Muscle Activity during Passive and Active Movements in Preterm and Full-Term Infants.

Manifestation of muscle reactions at an early developmental stage may reflect the processes underlying the generation of appropriate muscle tone, which is also an integral part of all movements. In preterm infants, some aspects of muscular development may occur differently than in infants born at term. Here we evaluated early manifestations of muscle tone by measuring muscle responses to passive stretching (StR) and shortening (ShR) in both upper and lower limbs in preterm infants (at the corrected age from 0 weeks to 12 months), and compared them to those reported in our previous study on full-term infants.

Higher Responsiveness of Pattern Generation Circuitry to Sensory Stimulation in Healthy Humans Is Associated with a Larger Hoffmann Reflex.

The state and excitability of pattern generators are attracting the increasing interest of neurophysiologists and clinicians for understanding the mechanisms of the rhythmogenesis and neuromodulation of the human spinal cord. It has been previously shown that tonic sensory stimulation can elicit non-voluntary stepping-like movements in non-injured subjects when their limbs were placed in a gravity-neutral unloading apparatus. However, large individual differences in responsiveness to such stimuli were observed, so that the effects of sensory neuromodulation manifest only in some of the subjects.

Increasing muscle activity correlations during spontaneous movements in the first six months of life.

Spontaneous muscle activity in the first months of life is an important prerequisite to developing voluntary motor skills and to adapting sensorimotor circuits and muscle tone to body and environmental changes. Even though high variability is a characteristic of early development, several studies have reported significant correlations of limb movements. These assessments were typically made based on kinematics, while the analysis of lower and upper limb muscle activity may provide additional information about maturation of the neuromuscular control.

The use of egg characters for the classification of Notodontidae (Lepidoptera), with keys to the common Palaearctic genera and species.

On the basis of comparative-morphological analysis of 43 genera and 92 species of Palaearctic Notodontidae, as well as the study of the eggs of outgroup species, complexes of characters that are diagnostic, taxonomic or phylogenetic are singled out. It is shown that the egg characteristics are of great taxonomic value at species and generic levels. Some characters are useful for grouping genera.

Muscle Responses to Passive Joint Movements in Infants During the First Year of Life.

Muscle tone represents one of the important concepts for characterizing changes in the state of the developing nervous system. It can be manifested in the level of activity of flexors and extensors and in muscle reactions to its passive stretching (StR) or shortening (ShR). Here we investigated such reactions in a cohort of healthy infants aged from 2 weeks to 12 months.

Comparative morphology on the egg chorion characters of some Noctuidae (Lepidoptera).

A comparative morphological analysis is provided for 70 species belonging to 59 genera of 13 subfamilies of Noctuidae from Ukraine. Diagnostic characters of the eggs for some species are identified. A comparison with representatives from other families of Noctuoidea is conducted.