Inhibitory motoneurons in arthropod motor control: organisation, function, evolution

Miniaturisation of somatic cells in animals is limited, for reasons ranging from the accommodation of organelles to surface-to-volume ratio. Consequently, muscle and nerve cells vary in diameters by about two orders of magnitude, in animals covering 12 orders of magnitude in body mass. Small animals thus have to control their behaviour with few muscle fibres and neurons. Hexapod leg muscles, for instance, may consist of a single to a few 100 fibres, and they are controlled by one to, rarely, 19 motoneurons. A typical mammal has thousands of fibres per muscle supplied by hundreds of motoneurons for comparable behavioural performances. Arthopods—crustaceans, hexapods, spiders, and their kin—are on average much smaller than vertebrates, and they possess inhibitory motoneurons for a motor control strategy that allows a broad performance spectrum despite necessarily small cell numbers. This arthropod motor control strategy is reviewed from functional and evolutionary perspectives and its components are described with a focus on inhibitory motoneurons. Inhibitory motoneurons are particularly interesting for a number of reasons: evolutionary and phylogenetic comparison of functional specialisations, evolutionary and developmental origin and diversification, and muscle fibre recruitment strategies.

• Publication year

  2014

• Venue

  Journal of Comparative Physiology

• Publication date

  2014-06-26

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1007/s00359-014-0922-2PMID 24965579PMCID 4108845
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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