Topic: spinal motor neurons

Motor units (MUs), which compose spinal motor neurons and their innervated muscle fibers, are the fundamental unit of motor control. For nearly one hundred years, researchers have studied how MUs are recruited during movement, and the textbook understanding is that a simplified control strategy is used. A single ‘common drive’ is sent to a muscle’s motor neuron pool, which controls the amount of force that muscle will produce. This understanding has drawn primarily from experiments involving subjects generating static or gradually changing forces. However, recent results, using experiments wit

Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) is an almost selective motoneuron (MN) neurodegenerative disease in which the factors determining preferential involvement of MN are yet to be fully understood. TDP-43 nuclear clearance and aggregates are identified as a major component of the ubiquitinated neuronal cytoplasmic inclusions deposited in spinal motor neurons both in familiar and sALS patients. Since TDP43 protein contains the HSC70 recognition motif, and, therefore, chaperon mediated autophagy (CMA) function may represent a cellular mechanism to regulate TDP43 cytoplasmic turnover in cells. We