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Neural control of spatially-structured muscle recruitment during behavior

Timothy A. Machado, PhD

Department of Neuroscience, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA

Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Chevy Chase, MD, USA

Biography

I am a Presidential Assistant Professor in the Department of Neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania and a Freeman Hrabowski Scholar with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. My lab uses multiregional neural recording techniques to study how disparate motor command signals arise across the brain to control movement. The results from our work will lead to a better understanding of how neural computation produces behavior, will inform new approaches for treating neurological conditions, and will lead to the development of improved brain-machine interfaces for humans. Before beginning my lab, I was a postdoctoral fellow with Karl Deisseroth at Stanford. There, I developed new methods to simultaneously monitor and manipulate neural activity across brain regions, enabling the study of neural representations for sensations and actions. During my graduate studies at Columbia University, I worked with Liam Paninski and Tom Jessell. I developed a novel approach for characterizing spinal cord neural dynamics during locomotion.

Abstract

Many behaviors generate little or no apparent movement, rendering them invisible to visual analysis. Such behaviors are often critical indicators of psychiatric or motor disorders, and they include muscle contraction patterns such as jaw-clenching, gripping, subtle tremors, and even whole-body isometric co-contraction. Unfortunately, the standard approach for muscle recording, electromyography (EMG), suffers from significant drawbacks: it requires invasive surgery in rodents, its signal quality degrades over time, and it scales to at most a handful of muscles. To overcome these limitations, we have developed a new population muscle imaging approach to monitor activity in many identified muscles simultaneously. Our method, optomyography (OMG), enables direct measurements of muscle activation at ultra-high spatial and temporal resolution. We have applied this method across the orofacial system of behaving mice and have identified spatially-structured recruitment patterns within individual muscles.

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