Motor neuron articles within Nature Communications

Featured

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Kalium channelrhodopsins (KCRs) are promising tools for optogenetic silencing. Here, the authors show that KCRs inhibit cellular excitability in flies, worms, and fish, establishing them as first-line tools for inhibiting diverse types of excitable cells.

    • Stanislav Ott
    • , Sangyu Xu
    •  & Adam Claridge-Chang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The full heterogeneity and different functional roles of cholinergic neurons in the adult spinal cord remain to be defined. Here the authors develop a targeted single nuclear RNA sequencing approach and use it to identify an array of cholinergic interneurons, as well as visceral and skeletal motor neurons.

    • Mor R. Alkaslasi
    • , Zoe E. Piccus
    •  & Claire E. Le Pichon

  • Article
    | Open Access

    ALS is a neurodegenerative disease characterized by loss of motor neurons. Here, the authors showed that reduced levels of the VSP35 subunit in the retromer complex is a conserved ALS feature and identified a new lead compound increasing retromer stability ameliorating the disease phenotype.

    • Luca Muzio
    • , Riccardo Sirtori
    •  & Gianvito Martino

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Model-based centralization schemes, though able to quantify locomotion control in animals and bio-inspired robots, are limited to specific systems. Here, the authors report a generalized information-based centralization scheme that unifies existing models and can be applied to different systems.

    • Izaak D. Neveln
    • , Amoolya Tirumalai
    •  & Simon Sponberg

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The wiring of peripheral neural circuits that regulate heart rate is poorly understood. In this study, authors used tissue clearing for high-resolution characterization of nerves in the heart in 3D and transgenic and novel viral vector approaches to identify peripheral parasympathetic and sympathetic neuronal populations involved in heart rate control in mice.

    • Pradeep S. Rajendran
    • , Rosemary C. Challis
    •  & Kalyanam Shivkumar

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Repeat expansion mutation in C9ORF72 is the most common cause of familial ALS. Here, the authors generate motor neurons from cells of patients with C9ORF72 mutations, and characterize changes in gene expression in these motor neurons compared to genetically corrected lines, which suggest that glutamate receptor subunit GluA1 is dysregulated in this form of ALS.

    • Bhuvaneish T. Selvaraj
    • , Matthew R. Livesey
    •  & Siddharthan Chandran

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) leads to selective loss of motor neurons. Using motor neurons derived from induced pluripotent stem cells from patients with ALS and FUS mutations, the authors demonstrate that axonal transport deficits that are observed in these cells can be rescued by HDAC6 inhibition.

    • Wenting Guo
    • , Maximilian Naujock
    •  & Ludo Van Den Bosch

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Mutated tRNA synthetases can incorporate non-canonical amino acids into proteins. Erdmann et al. exploit this property to metabolically label newly synthesized proteins in selected cell types in Drosophila, and demonstrate their detection using proteomics (BONCAT) and fluorescence imaging (FUNCAT).

    • Ines Erdmann
    • , Kathrin Marter
    •  & Daniela C. Dieterich

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The differentiation of spinal motor neurons (MNs) from mouse and human embryonic stem cells provides opportunities to model MN development and disease, but most protocols produce only a subset of the MN subtypes found in vivo. Here the authors show that limb projecting lateral motor column MNs can be efficiently generated though the expression of Foxp1.

    • Katrina L. Adams
    • , David L. Rousso
    •  & Bennett G. Novitch

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Motor learning is characterized by diverse cognitive processes, which lack a unified theoretical framework. Here, Takiyama et al.present a model demonstrating that motor learning is determined by prospective errors, which they test in a specially designed visuomotor adaptation task.

    • Ken Takiyama
    • , Masaya Hirashima
    •  & Daichi Nozaki

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a neurodegenerative disease that affects spinal cord motor neurons. Here the authors use induced pluripotent stem cell-derived motor neurons obtained from patients with ALS-linked mutations, and find functional deficits resulting from a progressive decrease in voltage-activated Na+ and K+currents that occur in the absence of cell death.

    • Anna-Claire Devlin
    • , Karen Burr
    •  & Gareth B. Miles

  • Article |

    Various homeostatic mechanisms have been implicated in regulating neuronal excitability. Kishore and Fetcho study homeostatic mechanisms in zebrafish and find they regulate topographic patterns of dendritic dynamics within pools of motoneurons, that map onto ordered patterns of recruitment during behaviour.

    • Sandeep Kishore
    •  & Joseph R. Fetcho

  • Article |

    Vocal communication is relatively common among fish: the midshipman being an example with a particularly wide dynamic range. In this paper, the authors demonstrate that different populations of hindbrain neurons are responsible for the frequency and duration of these calls.

    • Boris P. Chagnaud
    • , Robert Baker
    •  & Andrew H. Bass

  • Article
    | Open Access

    It was previously thought that the nerves in the pectoral fin of fish came solely from the spinal cord. Here, motoneurons in ray-finned fish are shown to also originate from the hindbrain, demonstrating that innervation was from both the hindbrain and the spinal cord in ancesteral vertebrates.

    • Leung-Hang Ma
    • , Edwin Gilland
    •  & Robert Baker

Browse broader subjects

Browse Motor neuron across other nature.com journals