ArticleThe Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience2021
Synergistic Organization of Neural Inputs from Spinal Motor Neurons to Extrinsic and Intrinsic Hand Muscles.
Article in The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
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16 citing papers in PubMed, 53 citations in OpenAlex.
- Structured modulations in high-density EMG patterns from a single muscle enable simultaneous control of natural and extra degrees of freedom.Journal of neuroengineering and rehabilitation · 2026Article
- Adaptation of motor unit synergies in the synergetic ankle plantarflexors in ambulatory persons with incomplete spinal cord injury.Journal of neuroengineering and rehabilitation · 2026Article
- The Effect of 5G Mobile Phone Electromagnetic Exposure on Corticospinal and Intracortical Excitability in Healthy Adults: A Randomized Controlled Pilot Study.Brain sciences · 2025Article
- Does body weight support improve neural and biomechanical measures during treadmill gait in children with unilateral cerebral palsy?Frontiers in rehabilitation sciences · 2025Article
- Learning dynamics of muscle synergies during non-biomimetic control maps.Wearable technologies · 2025Article
- Anthropomorphic Tendon-Based Hands Controlled by Agonist-Antagonist Corticospinal Neural Network.Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Discrimination of finger movements by magnetomyography with optically pumped magnetometers.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Two motor neuron synergies, invariant across ankle joint angles, activate the triceps surae during plantarflexion.The Journal of physiology · 2023Article
- Motor unit-based synergies in a non-compartmentalized muscle.Experimental brain research · 2023Article
- The Forces Generated by Agonist Muscles during Isometric Contractions Arise from Motor Unit Synergies.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2023Article
- Common synaptic input, synergies and size principle: Control of spinal motor neurons for movement generation.The Journal of physiology · 2023Review
- Complexity of modular neuromuscular control increases and variability decreases during human locomotor development.Communications biology · 2022Article
- Data Fusion-Based Musculoskeletal Synergies in the Grasping Hand.Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- The control and training of single motor units in isometric tasks are constrained by a common input signal.eLife · 2022Article
- Neural inputs from spinal motor neurons to lateralis vastus muscle: Comparison between sprinters and nonathletes.Frontiers in physiology · 2022Article
- Inter-Person Differences in Isometric Coactivations of Triceps Surae and Tibialis Anterior Decrease in Young, but Not in Older Adults After 14 Days of Bed Rest.Frontiers in physiology · 2021Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Our current understanding of synergistic muscle control is based on the analysis of muscle activities. Modules (synergies) in muscle coordination are extracted from electromyographic (EMG) signal envelopes. Each envelope indirectly reflects the neural drive received by a muscle; therefore, it carries information on the overall activity of the innervating motor neurons. However, it is not known whether the output of spinal motor neurons, whose number is orders of magnitude greater than the muscles they innervate, is organized in a low-dimensional fashion when performing complex tasks. Here, we hypothesized that motor neuron activities exhibit a synergistic organization in complex tasks and therefore that the common input to motor neurons results in a large dimensionality reduction in motor neuron outputs. To test this hypothesis, we factorized the output spike trains of motor neurons innervating 14 intrinsic and extrinsic hand muscles and analyzed the dimensionality of control when healthy individuals exerted isometric forces using seven grip types. We identified four motor neuron synergies, accounting for >70% of the variance of the activity of 54.1 ± 12.9 motor neurons, and we identified four functionally similar muscle synergies. However, motor neuron synergies better discriminated individual finger forces than muscle synergies and were more consistent with the expected role of muscles actuating each finger. Moreover, in a few cases, motor neurons innervating the same muscle were active in separate synergies. Our findings suggest a highly divergent net neural inputs to spinal motor neurons from spinal and supraspinal structures, contributing to the dimensionality reduction captured by muscle synergies.
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