Band of Gennari

The stria of Gennari (also 'band' or 'line' of Gennari) is a band of myelinated axons projecting into layer 4C of the primary visual cortex from the lateral geniculate nucleus. This formation is visible to the naked eye, and is coterminous with area V1. All feed-forward signals passed to V1 arrive through these fibers. Although its retinotopic organization is identical to that of the other layers of V1, layer 4 differs in a number of ways, such as lacking ocular dominance columns, and is presumed to perform significantly different functional roles than the rest of V1.