Mechanical Stretch Inhibition Sensitizes Proprioceptors to Compressive Stresses

Description

A repetitive gait cycle is an archetypical component within the behavioural repertoire of many if not all animals including humans. It originates from mechanical feedback within proprioceptors to adjust the motorprogram during locomotion and thus leads to a periodic orbit in a low dimensional space. Here, we investigate the mechanics, molecules and neurons responsible for proprioception in Caenorhabditis (C.) elegans to gain insight into how mechanosensation shapes the orbital trajectory to a well-defined limit cycle. We used genome editing, force spectroscopy and multiscale modeling and found that alternating tension and compression with the spectrin network of a single proprioceptor encodes body posture and informs TRP-4/NOMPC and TWK-16/TREK2 homologs of mechanosensitive ion channels during locomotion. In contrast to a widely accepted model of proprioceptive ‘stretch’ reception, we found that proprioceptors activated locally under compressive stresses in vivo and in vitro, and propose that this property leads to compartmentalized activity within long axons delimited by curvature-dependent mechanical stresses.

Resources

Name Format Description Link
0 http://data.europa.eu/88u/dataset/oai-zenodo-org-5016768
0 http://data.europa.eu/88u/dataset/oai-zenodo-org-5016768
0 http://data.europa.eu/88u/dataset/oai-zenodo-org-5016768
0 http://data.europa.eu/88u/dataset/oai-zenodo-org-5016768
0 http://data.europa.eu/88u/dataset/oai-zenodo-org-5016768
0 http://data.europa.eu/88u/dataset/oai-zenodo-org-5016768
0 http://data.europa.eu/88u/dataset/oai-zenodo-org-5016768

Tags

  • mechanosensation
  • proprioception
  • gcamp
  • eigenworms
  • optical-tweezers
  • trp-channels
  • c.-elegans

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