Supraspinal control of posture
During most everyday activities,
humans and animals need to maintain a specific body posture. Typically a
deviation from a desired posture evokes correcting motor response, which leads
to restoration of the posture. In this posture control system commands for
postural corrections are generated on the basis of sensory information. This
control system is based on the in-born mechanisms and operates automatically.
Both spinal networks and supraspinal motor centers
participate, but at present their contributions are not clear.
The
overall aim of this project of Dr. Beloozerova is to
characterize the commands transmitted from the brain motor centers to the spinal
cord during postural tasks. This will allow us to understand the relationship between the
two levels of postural control: spinal and supraspinal.
We hypothesize that the contribution from higher brain centers increases with
complication of postural tasks, and strive to understand this contribution.
In our experiments, we test subjects
during balancing on a platform, which periodically tilts a little to the right
and then to the left. We encourage the subjects to assume different postures (such
as leaning to the right or to the left) or to perform stepping movements while
still keeping balance on the platform. We record kinematics and dynamic
parameters of limbs and body movements, the activity of limb muscles, and the
neuronal activity of the motor cortex, motor thalamus, and midbrain. We then
compare body mechanics, the activity of muscles, and the activity of brain
areas during balancing with different postural configurations and reveal the
parameters, which are associated specifically with each of the configurations.
This project is a collaborative
effort between our laboratory and the laboratory of Dr. Tatiana Deliagina at Karolinska
Institute in
A graduate student from Karolinska Institute Anastasia Karayannidou did her full academic year rotation (2005-2006) in my laboratory during her second year in graduate school. She came back next year for a month of additional experiments and then successfully defended her Ph.D. in June 2009 with five full size publications, three of which resulted from her work in my laboratory.
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