During embryogenesis the spinal cord shifts position along the anterior-posterior axis relative to adjacent tissues. How motor neurons whose cell bodies are located in the spinal cord while their axons reside in adjacent tissues compensate for such tissue shift is not well understood. Using live cell imaging in zebrafish, we show that as motor axons exit from the spinal cord and extend through ...

Chiovetto E. The motor system plays the violin: a musical metaphor inferred from the oscillatory activity of the -motoneuron pools during locomotion. J Neurophysiol 105: 1429–1431, 2011. First published January 27, 2011; doi:10.1152/jn.01119.2010.—Despite substantial advances in the field, particularly resulting from physiological studies in animals, the neural mechanisms underlying the generat...

During the evolution of bipedal modes of locomotion, a sequential rostrocaudal activation of trunk muscles due to the undulatory body movements was replaced by more complex and discrete bursts of activity. Nevertheless, the capacity for segmental rhythmogenesis and the rostrocaudal propagation of spinal cord activity has been conserved. In humans, motoneurons of different muscles are arranged i...

Precise neuronal firing is especially important for behaviors highly dependent on the correct sequencing and timing of muscle activity patterns, such as acoustic signaling. Acoustic signaling an communication modality vertebrates, including many teleost fishes. Toadfishes are well known to exhibit high temporal fidelity in synchronous motoneuron within a hindbrain network directly determining s...

BACKGROUND Most of what is known regarding the actions of injectable barbiturate anesthetics on the activity of lumbar sensory neurons arises from experiments performed in acute animal preparations that are exposed to invasive surgery and neural depression caused by coadministered inhalational anesthetics. Other parameters such as cortical synchronization and motor ouflow are typically not moni...

Sensory neurons possess the central and peripheral branches and they form unique spinal neural circuits with motoneurons during development. Peripheral branches of sensory axons fasciculate with the motor axons that extend toward the peripheral muscles from the central nervous system (CNS), whereas the central branches of proprioceptive sensory neurons directly innervate motoneurons. Although a...

Phrenic motoneuron firing rates during brief inspiratory resistive loading (IRL) are high, and nearly all the motoneurons are recruited. Diaphragmatic fatigue has been difficult to demonstrate during IRL. Furthermore, evidence from studies in limb muscles has shown variable motoneuron responses to prolonged high-intensity loads. We studied phrenic motoneuron firing rates before, during, and aft...

Oscillations in the primary motor cortex are transmitted through the corticospinal tract to the motoneuron pool. This pathway is believed to produce an effective and direct command from the motor cortex to the spinal motoneurons for the modulation of the force output. In this study, we used a computational model of a population of motoneurons to investigate the factors that can influence the tr...

Our previous studies have shown that partial denervation of extensor digitorum longus muscle (EDL) in the rat at 3 days of age causes an increase in the activity of the intact motoneurons. The originally phasic pattern of activity of EDL became tonic after partial denervation. These modifications of motoneuron activity were associated with the change in the phenotype of the muscle from fast to ...