Studies were performed on the levator palpebrae superioris muscle, isolated from foetuses aged 17 to 30 weeks. The number of muscle spindles varied from 2 in the 17th week to 7 in the 30th week. The length of the muscle spindles ranged from 20 to 500 microm, and the diameter varied from 10 to 70 microm. These observations show that the number of muscle spindles in levator palpebrae superioris m...

KEY POINTS Sleep spindle are usually considered to play a major role in inhibiting sensory inputs. Using nociceptive stimuli in humans, we tested the effect of spindles on behavioural, autonomic and cortical responses in two experiments using surface and intracerebral electroencephalographic recordings. We found that sleep spindles do not prevent arousal reactions to nociceptive stimuli and tha...

Cipollone (1897) first noted that two or more encapsulated sensory regions occur along the length of the intrafusal bundle in frog skeletal muscle. Similar arrangements have been evident from the reports of Baum (1899) and Barker (1948) on mammals, and termed 'tandem' by Cooper and Daniel (1956). Vihvelin (1932) and Jahn (1959), in their studies of this arrangement in the amphibian muscle spind...

BACKGROUND Mitotic and meiotic spindles are assemblies of microtubules (MTs) that form during cell division to physically separate sister chromosomes. How the various components of spindles act together to establish and maintain the dynamic bipolar structure of spindles is not understood. Interactions between MTs and motors have been studied both experimentally and theoretically in many context...

The two kinds of sleep spindles, previously described in the rat, were studied in intact animals, cerveau isole preparations and unilaterally neodecorticated rats. The anterior (frontal) spindles reach their maximum during deep slow sleep, when accompanied by theta activity, during the so-called intermediate stage which occurs just before and after paradoxical sleep. This stage is extended by l...

Mitotic spindles are microtubule-based structures responsible for chromosome partitioning during cell division. Although the roles of microtubules and microtubule-based motors in mitotic spindles are well established, whether or not actin filaments (F-actin) and F-actin-based motors (myosins) are required components of mitotic spindles has long been controversial. Based on the demonstration tha...

The article reports that to improve the functional characteristics of friction drive vertical spindles, it was proposed replace its conventional V-belts with poly-V-belts. Therefore, rollers changed parameters are installed on spindles while maintaining magnitude rolling radius serial rollers. To determine functionality new drive, a stand single spindle drum created, which allows you all perfor...

INTRODUCTION The relationship between sleep spindles and spike-wave discharges (SWDs) can be called classical. It was found in humans that in more than 90% of cases studied SWDs occurred in the spindle stage of sleep. Next, sleep spindles could be transformed into SWDs after an injection with penicillin in cats, and benzodiazepines and barbiturates suppress SWDs and enhance sleep spindles while...

Several studies have identified two types of sleep spindles: fast (13-15 Hz) centroparietal and slow (11-13 Hz) frontal spindles. Alterations in spindle activity have been observed in Alzheimer's disease (AD) and Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI). Only few studies have separately assessed fast and slow spindles in these patients showing a reduction of fast spindle count, but the possible local sp...

BACKGROUND Sleep spindles are thought to induce synaptic changes and thereby contribute to memory consolidation during sleep. Patients with schizophrenia show dramatic reductions of both spindles and sleep-dependent memory consolidation, which may be causally related. METHODS To examine the relations of sleep spindle activity to sleep-dependent consolidation of motor procedural memory, 21 chr...