There is clinical need to extend the understanding of epilepsy and to find novel approaches to treat this condition. Bang-sensitive (bs) Drosophila mutants, which exhibit reduced thresholds for seizure, offer an attractive possibility to combine tractable genetics, electrophysiology, and high-throughput screening. However, despite these advantages, the precise electrophysiological aberrations t...

Every trunk hemisegment of the zebrafish is innervated by 3 identified primary motoneurons whose development can be observed directly in living embryos. In this paper, we describe another identified neuron that is part of this system. Unlike the other primary motoneurons which are present in all trunk hemisegments, this cell is present in slightly less than half of the trunk hemisegments. Addit...

Spinal motoneurons integrate a vast synaptic input and are the final conveyors of motor commands to skeletal muscle. Motoneuron regeneration includes altered contacts between the motoneuron and several other cell types. The severed axon elongates along Schwann cells in the nerve, while other types of glia interact closely with lesioned motoneurons in the spinal cord. Simultaneously, cell contac...

Males and females behave differently during reproduction. Although sexually differentiated patterns of behavior in vertebrates are clearly regulated by the action of gonadal steroids, the neural mechanisms underlying the expression of sex-specific behavior are largely unknown. Male and female African clawed frogs (Xenopus laevis) produce sexually distinct vocalizations composed of a series of c...

Abstract Introduction Neurons in the pre-Bötzinger complex are critical for generation of inspiratory rhythm and control activity genioglossus muscle via activation hypoglossal motoneurons. Activation causes anterior movement tongue widens upper airway. As obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is associated with obstruction airway, this neuronal pathway may be a novel therapeutic approach. Orexins have...

Antidromically identified lumbar motoneurons intracellularly recorded in the entire brainstem/spinal cord preparation isolated from SOD1(G85R) postnatal mice (P3-P10) were labelled with neurobiotin and fully reconstructed in 3D from serial sections in order to analyse their morphology. This staining procedure revealed differences between WT and SOD1(G85R) dendritic trees for most metric and top...

The response of repetitively firing human motoneurons to a composite excitatory input was evaluated. It was clearly shown that the response of the motoneurons to the transient input decreased with an increase in the background firing rate of the cell. The current model of repetitively firing human motoneurons could not account for this experimental result. Therefore, a compartmental modelling a...

Motoneurons are an essential component of all metazoan nervous systems, but it is unknown whether there is an evolutionarily conserved mechanism for generating motoneurons during neurogenesis. In the vertebrate CNS, HB9/MNR2 transcription factors are specifically expressed in all somatic motoneurons and are necessary to distinguish motoneurons from interneurons, in part by repressing interneuro...

We hypothesize that sleep state-dependent withdrawal of serotonin (5-hydroxytryptamine, 5-HT) at upper airway (UAW) dilator motoneurons contributes significantly to sleep-related suppression of dilator muscle activity in obstructive sleep apnea. Identification of 5-HT receptor subtypes involved in postsynaptic facilitation of UAW motoneuron activity may provide pharmacotherapies for this preval...

Following nerve injury in neonatal rats, a large proportion of motoneurons die, possibly as a consequence of an increase in vulnerability to the excitotoxic effects of glutamate. Calcium-dependent glutamate excitotoxicity is thought to play a significant role not only in injury-induced motoneuron death, but also in motoneuron degeneration in diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS)....