SLEEP SPINDLES ARE CHARACTERISTIC BRAIN WAVES DURING NREM SLEEP. AS ITS NAME SUGGESTS, A SLEEP SPINDLE HAS A WAXING-AND-WANING WAVEFORM lasting between 1 to 3 s at a frequency of 11-15 Hz. Spindle waves recur every 3 to 10 s. Several studies indicate that spindles originate in the thalamus. Through extensive animal investigations, Steriade et al. showed that networks of neurons in the thalamus ...

Muscle spindles are critically involved in the reflex regulation of the dynamic and static actions of muscles; the sensitivity of the actions is under strong efferent control2, 8. In the usually studied mammal, the cat, the receptor elements in the muscle spindles convey by two types of fibers (Groups I and II) muscle displacement and velocity information to the central nervous system. The func...

During light slow-wave sleep, the thalamo-cortical network oscillates in waxing-and-waning patterns at about 7 to 14 Hz and lasting for 500 ms to 3 s, called spindles, with the thalamus rhythmically sending strong excitatory volleys to the cortex. Concurrently, the hippocampal activity is characterized by transient and strong excitatory events, Sharp-Waves-Ripples (SPWRs), directly affecting ne...

Spindle elongation is crucial to normal chromosome separation in eukaryotes; in particular, it is required for or associated with the extension of distance between spindle poles and the further moving apart of the already separated chromosomes. However, little is known about the relationship between spindle elongation and the status of chromosome separation, and it is unknown whether spindle el...

OBJECTIVE The objective of the present work was to develop and compare methods for automatic detection of bilateral sleep spindles. METHODS AND MATERIALS All-night sleep electroencephalographic (EEG) recordings of 12 healthy subjects with a median age of 40 years were studied. The data contained 6043 visually scored bilateral spindles occurring in frontopolar or central brain location. In the...

The <1Hz slow oscillation (SO) and spindles are hallmarks of mammalian non-rapid eye movement and slow wave sleep. Spindle activity occurring phase-locked to the SO is considered a candidate mediator of memory consolidation during sleep. We used source localization of magnetoencephalographic (MEG) and electroencephalographic (EEG) recordings from 11 sleeping human subjects for an in-depth analy...

Kinesin-5 is essential in many species for the formation of a bipolar spindle. Although bipolar tetramers were known to crossbridge pairs of microtubules, the mechanism for organizing spindles was unclear. However, new experiments have revealed unique properties of kinesin-5, including some associated with the tail domain, that provide clues as to how spindles are assembled.

A tandem spindle is defined as one in which several encapsulated sensory regions are linked together by some degree of muscle fibre continuity. Generally only one or two muscle fibres are continuous from capsule to capsule, while the rest taper off and partake of only one encapsulation. In the most common type, two capsules occur in linear succession (double tandem); triple and quintuple arrang...