The contractile and electrical properties of motor units in the first dorsal interosseous muscle of the hand have been studied in 26 patients with ulnar neuropathies and motor neurone disease (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis). Among patients with unilateral pressure or entrapment ulnar neuropathies, there was a tendency for the twitch tensions for single motor units to be smaller, while the surfa...

Cardiac specification models are widely utilized to provide insight into the expression and function of homologous genes and structures in humans. In Drosophila, contractions of the alary muscles control hemolymph inflow and support the cardiac tube, however embryonic development of these muscles remain largely understudied. We found that alary muscles in Drosophila embryos appear as segmental ...

Kutch JJ, Kuo AD, Rymer WZ. Extraction of individual muscle mechanical action from endpoint force. J Neurophysiol 103: 3535–3546, 2010. First published April 14, 2010; doi:10.1152/jn.00956.2009. Most motor tasks require the simultaneous coordination of multiple muscles. That coordination is poorly understood in part because there is no noninvasive means of isolating a single muscle’s contributi...

Pal, Pramod Kr., Ritsuko Hanajima, Carolyn A. Gunraj, Jie-Yuan Li, Aparna Wagle-Shukla, Francesca Morgante, and Robert Chen. Effect of low-frequency repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation on interhemispheric inhibition. J Neurophysiol 94: 1668–1675, 2005. First published May 4, 2005; doi:10.1152/jn.01306.2004. We studied the effects of 1-Hz repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rT...

An unusual origin of the common interosseous artery is reported in the paper. During educational dissection of a 37-year-old male, a rare variation in the origin of common interosseous artery of the right upper limb was observed. The common interosseous artery directly separated from radial artery. The right anterior interosseous artery is continued from common interosseous artery. Anterior and...

Can human muscle be highly efficient in vivo? Animal muscles typically show contraction-coupling efficiencies <50% in vitro but a recent study reports that the human first dorsal interosseous (FDI) muscle of the hand has an efficiency value in vivo of 68%. We examine two key factors that could account for this apparently high efficiency value: (1) transfer of cross-bridge work into mechanical w...