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The Journal of Neuroscience, April 1, 2009, 29(13):4109-4119; doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.5510-08.2009

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Behavioral/Systems/Cognitive
Neural Control of Unloaded Leg Posture and of Leg Swing in Stick Insect, Cockroach, and Mouse Differs from That in Larger Animals

Scott L. Hooper,^1,2 * Christoph Guschlbauer,^2 * Marcus Blümel,² Philipp Rosenbaum,² Matthias Gruhn,² Turgay Akay,³ and Ansgar Büschges²

¹Department of Biological Sciences, Ohio University, Athens, Ohio 45701, ²Tierphysiologie, Zoologisches Institut, Universität zu Köln, 50931 Köln, Germany, and ³Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics, Columbia University, New York, New York 10032

Correspondence should be addressed to Scott L. Hooper, Neuroscience Program, Department of Biological Sciences, Irvine Hall, Ohio University, Athens, OH 45701. Email: hooper{at}ohio.edu

Stick insect (Carausius morosus) leg muscles contract and relax slowly. Control of stick insect leg posture and movement could therefore differ from that in animals with faster muscles. Consistent with this possibility, stick insect legs maintained constant posture without leg motor nerve activity when the animals were rotated in air. That unloaded leg posture was an intrinsic property of the legs was confirmed by showing that isolated legs had constant, gravity-independent postures. Muscle ablation experiments, experiments showing that leg muscle passive forces were large compared with gravitational forces, and experiments showing that, at the rest postures, agonist and antagonist muscles generated equal forces indicated that these postures depended in part on leg muscles. Leg muscle recordings showed that stick insect swing motor neurons fired throughout the entirety of swing. To test whether these results were specific to stick insect, we repeated some of these experiments in cockroach (Periplaneta americana) and mouse. Isolated cockroach legs also had gravity-independent rest positions and mouse swing motor neurons also fired throughout the entirety of swing. These data differ from those in human and horse but not cat. These size-dependent variations in whether legs have constant, gravity-independent postures, in whether swing motor neurons fire throughout the entirety of swing, and calculations of how quickly passive muscle force would slow limb movement as limb size varies suggest that these differences may be caused by scaling. Limb size may thus be as great a determinant as phylogenetic position of unloaded limb motor control strategy.

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Received Nov. 10, 2008; revised Feb. 19, 2009; accepted Feb. 22, 2009.

Correspondence should be addressed to Scott L. Hooper, Neuroscience Program, Department of Biological Sciences, Irvine Hall, Ohio University, Athens, OH 45701. Email: hooper{at}ohio.edu

This article has been cited by other articles:

				M. Gruhn, G. von Uckermann, S. Westmark, A. Wosnitza, A. Buschges, and A. Borgmann Control of Stepping Velocity in the Stick Insect Carausius morosus J Neurophysiol, August 1, 2009; 102(2): 1180 - 1192. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

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