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Article
Analysis of Proprioceptive Sensory Innervation of the Mouse Soleus: A Whole-Mount Muscle Approach
PLOS ONE
  • Martha Jean Sonner, Wright State University
  • Marie C. Walters, Wright State University
  • David R. Ladle, Wright State University - Main Campus
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
1-25-2017
Abstract

Muscle proprioceptive afferents provide feedback critical for successful execution of motor tasks via specialized mechanoreceptors housed within skeletal muscles: muscle spindles, supplied by group Ia and group II afferents, and Golgi tendon organs, supplied by group Ib afferents. The morphology of these proprioceptors and their associated afferents has been studied extensively in the cat soleus, and to a lesser degree, in the rat; however, quantitative analyses of proprioceptive innervation in the mouse soleus are comparatively limited. The present study employed genetically-encoded fluorescent reporting systems to label and analyze muscle spindles, Golgi tendon organs, and the proprioceptive sensory neuron subpopulations supplying them within the intact mouse soleus muscle using high magnification confocal microscopy. Total proprioceptive receptors numbered 11.3 ± 0.4 and 5.2 ± 0.2 for muscle spindles and Golgi tendon organs, respectively, and these receptor counts varied independently (n = 27 muscles). Analogous to findings in the rat, muscle spindles analyzed were most frequently supplied by two proprioceptive afferents, and in the majority of instances, both were classified as primary endings using established morphological criteria. Secondary endings were most frequently observed when spindle associated afferents totaled three or more. The mean diameter of primary and secondary afferent axons differed significantly, but the distributions overlap more than previously observed in cat and rat studies.

Comments

© 2017 Sonner et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

DOI
10.1371/journal.pone.0170751
Citation Information
Martha Jean Sonner, Marie C. Walters and David R. Ladle. "Analysis of Proprioceptive Sensory Innervation of the Mouse Soleus: A Whole-Mount Muscle Approach" PLOS ONE Vol. 12 Iss. 1 (2017) ISSN: 19326203
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/david_ladle/18/