Motor control articles within Nature

Featured

  • Article |

    In mouse cortex, ‘preparatory’ activity that encodes future movements is remarkably robust against large-scale perturbations; this robustness is achieved by corrective signals from unperturbed parts of the network.

    • Nuo Li
    • , Kayvon Daie
    •  & Shaul Druckmann

  • Letter |

    WebMotor neurons in zebrafish are shown to be more than simply output neurons, since they are able to influence, through gap junctions, the strength of the input they receive from V2a interneurons and, thereby, the frequency and duration of locomotor activity.

    • Jianren Song
    • , Konstantinos Ampatzis
    •  & Abdeljabbar El Manira

  • Article |

    Neural sequences recorded from the vocal premotor area HVC in juvenile birds learning song ‘syllables’ show ‘prototype’ syllables forming early, with multiple new highly divergent neural sequences emerging from this precursor syllable as learning progresses.

    • Tatsuo S. Okubo
    • , Emily L. Mackevicius
    •  & Michale S. Fee

  • Letter |

    Recording from Purkinje cells in monkeys, this study found that the combined simple-spike responses of bursting and pausing Purkinje cells, but not either population alone, predicted the real-time speed of saccades; moreover, when Purkinje cells were organized according to their complex-spike field, the population responses encoded both speed and direction of the eye during saccades via a gain field.

    • David J. Herzfeld
    • , Yoshiko Kojima
    •  & Reza Shadmehr

  • Article |

    During movement preparation, motor cortical neuronal subpopulations that project to downstream motor areas are more selective for the direction of upcoming movement than those that project to other cortical targets, especially immediately before movement, emphasizing the need to interpret complex neuronal responses measured during behaviour in the context of hierarchically organized cortical circuits.

    • Nuo Li
    • , Tsai-Wen Chen
    •  & Karel Svoboda

  • Article |

    This study tracks dragonfly head and body movements during high-velocity and high-precision prey-capture flights, and shows that the dragonfly uses predictive internal models and reactive control to build an interception trajectory that complies with biomechanical constraints.

    • Matteo Mischiati
    • , Huai-Ti Lin
    •  & Anthony Leonardo

  • Letter |

    Recordings from monkeys during motor learning suggest that durations of complex-spike (CS) responses to climbing-fibre inputs are meaningful signals correlated across the Purkinje-cell population during motor learning; longer climbing-fibre bursts lead to longer-duration CS responses, larger synaptic depression and stronger learning, thus forming a graded instruction.

    • Yan Yang
    •  & Stephen G. Lisberger

  • Letter |

    Inhibitory neuron activity is found to be relatively stable during motor learning whereas excitatory neuron activity is much more dynamic — the results indicate that a large number of neurons exhibit activity changes early on during motor learning, but this population is refined with subsequent practice.

    • Andrew J. Peters
    • , Simon X. Chen
    •  & Takaki Komiyama

  • Article |

    A population of spinal interneurons that form axo–axonic connections with the terminals of proprioceptive afferents are shown to mediate presynaptic inhibition; their ablation elicits harmonic oscillations during goal-directed forelimb movements, which can be modelled as the consequence of an increase in sensory feedback gain.

    • Andrew J. P. Fink
    • , Katherine R. Croce
    •  & Eiman Azim

  • Letter |

    Drosophila male courtship songs were thought to have a fixed structure with song repetition variations introduced unintentionally because of neural noise; this behavioural assay and computational modelling study instead reveals that males use fast changes in sensory information to actively pattern individual song sequences.

    • Philip Coen
    • , Jan Clemens
    •  & Mala Murthy

  • Article |

    Cervical propriospinal neurons (PNs) form a genetically accessible subclass of V2a interneurons that convey both premotor output and precerebellar copy signals; their ablation in mice impairs reaching movements selectively, and activation of their internal copy projection recruits a rapid cerebellar feedback loop that modulates forelimb movement.

    • Eiman Azim
    • , Juan Jiang
    •  & Thomas M. Jessell

  • Article |

    The authors use a combination of viral tracing and genetics to characterize the diversity of neurons projecting from mouse brainstem to motor neurons that control limb movements; in particular they discover that the medullary reticular formation ventral part (MdV) is functionally specialized for skilled forelimb motor control.

    • Maria Soledad Esposito
    • , Paolo Capelli
    •  & Silvia Arber

  • Outlook |

    An injury to the spine — the long bony assemblage that supports the upper body and the spinal cord that carries nerve signals — can be grim and costly. By Bill Cannon.

    • Bill Cannon

  • Outlook |

    Drugs to protect vulnerable neurons and encourage neural circuits to reform could one day improve the outlook for patients with acute spinal cord trauma.

    • Megan Cully

  • Outlook |

    There are easy ways to reduce the odds of suffering a life-changing injury, says Sara Klaas.

    • Sara J. Klaas

  • Outlook |

    Better data and technology could prevent many devastating injuries, says Peter Cripton.

    • Peter A. Cripton

  • Outlook |

    Mechanical suits known as exoskeletons can help people with spinal cord injuries stand up and walk away from their wheelchairs — but not without training.

    • Peter Gwynne

  • Outlook |

    The first stem-cell therapies for spinal cord injuries are already being tested in clinical studies, but scientific and political uncertainty remain.

    • Cassandra Willyard

  • Article |

    Inactivating the CLP1 RNA kinase in mice leads to a progressive loss of motor neurons, through a mechanism related to the accumulation of a novel set of small RNA fragments derived from aberrant processing of tyrosine pre-transfer RNA.

    • Toshikatsu Hanada
    • , Stefan Weitzer
    •  & Josef M. Penninger

  • Letter |

    In mice performing an operant task, increases in neural activity in direct- and indirect-pathway spiny projection neurons (SPNs) are associated with action initiation but not with inactivity, and concurrent activation of SPNs from both pathways in one hemisphere precedes the initiation of contraversive movements.

    • Guohong Cui
    • , Sang Beom Jun
    •  & Rui M. Costa

  • Letter
    | Open Access

    A premature stop codon in the DMRT3 gene has a major effect on the pattern of locomotion in horses, and the Dmrt3 transcription factor is critical in the development of a coordinated locomotor network in mice, suggesting that it has an important role in configuring the spinal circuits that control stride.

    • Lisa S. Andersson
    • , Martin Larhammar
    •  & Klas Kullander

  • Article |

    Stress-induced behavioural measures of anhedonia in adult mice, but not measures of behavioural despair, required a decrease in the strength of excitatory synapses on D1 dopamine receptor-expressing nucleus accumbens medium spiny neurons owing to activation of melanocortin 4 receptors.

    • Byung Kook Lim
    • , Kee Wui Huang
    •  & Robert C. Malenka

  • Letter |

    A new double-infection technique with viral vectors is used to interrupt transmission through the propriospinal neurons (PNs) in macaque monkeys, and this is found to impair reach and grasp movements, revealing a critical role for the PN-mediated pathway in the control of hand dexterity.

    • Masaharu Kinoshita
    • , Ryosuke Matsui
    •  & Tadashi Isa

  • Letter |

    In Bengalese finches, a basal ganglia circuit, the anterior forebrain pathway, can covertly acquire the ability to adaptively modify song without contributing to song production during practice or training.

    • Jonathan D. Charlesworth
    • , Timothy L. Warren
    •  & Michael S. Brainard

  • Letter |

    Neurotransmitter release and activity are modulated in the striatum of mice to demonstrate that the balance of activity within the two antagonistic, inhibitory pathways co-mingled in this nucleus regulates excitatory innervation of the basal ganglia during development.

    • Yevgenia Kozorovitskiy
    • , Arpiar Saunders
    •  & Bernardo L. Sabatini

  • Letter |

    A functional electrical stimulation system in primates that is controlled by recordings made from microelectrodes permanently implanted in the brain can be used to control the intensity of stimulation of muscles that are temporarily paralysed by pharmacological motor nerve blockade, thereby restoring voluntary control of the affected muscles; this is a major advance towards similar restoration of hand function in human patients with spinal cord injury.

    • C. Ethier
    • , E. R. Oby
    •  & L. E. Miller

  • News & Views |

    After training, animals and humans can make their thoughts interact directly with computers. A study provides evidence that the corticostriatal system of the brain is essential for this learning process.

    • David T. Blake

  • News & Views Forum |

    Purkinje cells in the brain region known as the cerebellum act by inhibiting their target neurons. A paper in this issue provides an explanation for how this inhibition might be used to control the timing of action potentials. But experts are not equally convinced about the functional relevance of this finding. See Letter p.502

    • Javier F. Medina
    •  & Kamran Khodakhah

  • News |

    A brain–computer interface allows paralysed patients to play music with brainpower alone.

    • Philip Ball

  • Letter |

    It has long been thought that motor control is achieved through the balanced activity of two distinct pathways through the basal ganglia that have opposing effects, but this has never been functionally verified. These authors directly test this hypothesis with optogenetic activation of different populations of mouse striatal neurons, and not only trace functional connectivity but demonstrate opposing effects on motor behaviour in a parkinsonian model.

    • Alexxai V. Kravitz
    • , Benjamin S. Freeze
    •  & Anatol C. Kreitzer

Browse broader subjects

Browse narrower subjects

Browse Motor control across other nature.com journals