Decorrelation of cortical inputs and motoneuron output

Abstract

Negro F, Farina D. Decorrelation of cortical inputs and motoneuron output. J Neurophysiol 106: 2688-2697, 2011. First published July 27, 2011; doi: 10.1152/jn.00336.2011.-Oscillations in the primary motor cortex are transmitted through the corticospinal tract to the motoneuron pool. This pathway is believed to produce an effective and direct command from the motor cortex to the spinal motoneurons for the modulation of the force output. In this study, we used a computational model of a population of motoneurons to investigate the factors that can influence the transmission of the cortical input to the output of motoneurons, since it can be quantified by coherence analysis. The simulations demonstrated that, despite the nonlinearity of the motoneurons, oscillations present in the cortical input are transmitted to the output of the motoneuron pool at the same frequency. However, the interference introduced by the nonlinearity of the system increases the variability of the oscillations in output, introducing spectral lines whose frequency depends on the input frequencies and the motoneuron discharge rates. Moreover, an additional source of synaptic input common to all motoneurons but independent from the corticospinal component decorrelates the cortical input and motoneuron output and, thus, decreases the magnitude of the estimated coherence, even if the effective cortical drive does not change. These results indicate that the corticospinal input can effectively be sampled by a small population of motoneurons. However, the transmission of a corticospinal drive to the motoneuron pool is influenced by the nonlinearity of the spiking processes of the active motoneurons and by synaptic inputs common to the motoneuron population but independent from the cortical input.