Background and Objective: Deprenyl is a drug for the treatment of Parkinson’s disease, where the dopaminergic neurons are the target of this drug. Several reports also documented that deprenyl has an effect on the sensory and motor neurons. There are some reports about the mode of action of deprenyl on m...

The ability of an animal to move and to interact with its environment requires that motoneurons correctly innervate specific muscles. Although many genes that regulate motoneuron development have been identified, our understanding of motor axon branching remains incomplete. We used transcriptional expression profiling to identify potential candidate genes involved in development of zebrafish id...

Interjoint reflex function of the insect leg contributes to postural control at rest or to movement control during locomotor movements. In the stick insect (Carausius morosus), we investigated the role that sensory signals from the femoral chordotonal organ (fCO), the transducer of the femur-tibia (FT) joint, play in patterning motoneuronal activity in the adjacent coxa-trochanteral (CT) joint ...

THE RESPIRATORY CONTROL SYSTEM is not just reflexive; it is smart, it learns, and, in fact, it has a working memory. The respiratory system listens to and carefully remembers how previous respiratory stimuli affect breathing. Respiratory memory is laid down by regulating synaptic strength between respiratory neurons. Repeated hypoxic bouts trigger a form of respiratory memory that functions to ...

We demonstrate that the cell adhesion molecule Fasciclin III (FAS3) mediates synaptic target recognition through homophilic interaction. FAS3 is expressed by the RP3 motoneuron and its target muscles during synaptic target recognition. The RP3 growth cone can form synapses on muscles that ectopically express FAS3. This mistargeting is dependent on FAS3 expression in the motoneurons. In addition...

Motoneuron diseases cause paralysis and death due to loss of motoneurons that innervate skeletal muscle. Spinal muscular atrophy is a human motoneuron disease that is genetically linked to the survival motor neuron gene (SMN). Although SMN was identified more than a decade ago, it remains unclear how decreased levels of the SMN protein cause spinal muscular atrophy. The use of animal models, ho...