Motor neurons are responsible for voluntary movement. Lower motor neurons are characterized by large soma, the potential to form very long axons, and wide-ranging dendritic arborization. They receive direction from various neuronal cell types and induce movement of skeletal muscle fibers through acetylcholine release at the neuromuscular junction. Each lower motor neuron can communicate with 10...

BACKGROUND Alpha motoneurons receive common synaptic inputs from spinal and supraspinal pathways. As a result, a certain degree of correlation can be observed between motoneuron spike trains during voluntary contractions. This has been studied by using correlation measures in the time and frequency domains. These measures are interpreted as reflecting different types of connectivity in the spin...

The flexor tibiae muscle of a locust hind leg consists of 10-11 pairs of fibre bundles in the main body of the muscle and a distal pair of bundles that form the accessory flexor muscle, all of which insert onto a common tendon. It is much smaller than the antagonistic extensor tibiae muscle and yet it is innervated by nine excitatory motor neurons, compared with only two for the extensor. To de...

The organization and functional logic of corticospinal motor neurons and their target connections remains unclear, despite their evident influence on movement. Spinal interneurons mediate much of this influence, yet we know little about the way in which corticospinal neurons engage spinal interneurons. This is perhaps not surprising given that the principles of organization of local spinal micr...

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...

During development, a specific subset of ventral spinal cord precursors called pMN cells produces first motor neurons and then oligodendrocyte progenitor cells (OPCs), which migrate, divide and differentiate as myelinating oligodendrocytes. pMN cells express the Olig2 transcription factor and Olig2 function is necessary for formation of spinal motor neurons and OPCs. In the hindbrain and midbra...

Intracellular recordings were made from an anteromedial group of spiking local interneurons in the metathoracic ganglion of the locust to determine the input connections that shape their mechanoreceptive fields on a hindleg and the output connections that define their effects on hindleg motor neurons. The receptive fields of these interneurons may contain excitatory and inhibitory regions. An e...

Motor neurons are probably the best characterised neuronal class in the vertebrate central nervous system and have become a paradigm for understanding the mechanisms that control the development of vertebrate neurons. For many investigators working on this problem the chick embryo is the model system of choice and from these studies a picture of the steps involved in motor neuron generation has...

The zebrafish detour (dtr) mutation generates a novel neuronal phenotype. In dtr mutants, most cranial motor neurons, especially the branchiomotor, are missing. However, spinal motor neurons are generated normally. The loss of cranial motor neurons is not due to aberrant hindbrain patterning, failure of neurogenesis, increased cell death or absence of hh expression. Furthermore, activation of t...