...) with a focus on regeneration of skeletal muscle and the muscle-derived electric organ. Application of in vivo microinjection techniques and generation of myogenic stem cell markers are beginning to overcome some of the challenges owing to the limitations of working with non-genetic animal models with extensive...

...Jason R. Gallant; Carl D. Hopkins; David L. Deitcher SUMMARY Electric organs (EOs) have evolved independently in vertebrates six times from skeletal muscle (SM). The transcriptional changes accompanying this developmental transformation are not presently well understood. Mormyrids and gymnotiforms...

...Alejo Rodríguez-Cattáneo; Angel Ariel Caputi SUMMARY This article shows that differences in the waveforms of the electric organ discharges (EODs) from two taxa are due to the different responsiveness of their electric organs (EOs) to their previous activity (auto-excitability). We compared...

...Jung A. Kim; Christine Laney; Jeanne Curry; Graciela A. Unguez SUMMARY In most groups of electric fish, the current-producing cells of electric organs (EOs) derive from striated muscle fibers but retain some phenotypic characteristics of their precursor muscle cells. Given the role of the MyoD...

...Harold H. Zakon; Derrick J. Zwickl; Ying Lu; David M. Hillis SUMMARY Animal communication systems are subject to natural selection so the imprint of selection must reside in the genome of each species. Electric fish generate electric organ discharges (EODs) from a muscle-derived electric organ(EO...

...Stefan Schuster; Natalie Otto SUMMARY Weakly electric fish communicate and electrolocate objects in the dark by discharging their electric organs (EOs) and monitoring the spatiotemporal pattern of current flow through their skin. In the South-American pulse-type gymnotid fish these organs often...

...John P. Sullivan; Sébastien Lavoué; Carl D. Hopkins ABSTRACT We present a new molecular phylogeny for 41 species of African mormyroid electric fishes derived from the 12S, 16S and cytochrome b genes and the nuclear RAG2 gene. From this, we reconstruct the evolution of the complex electric organs...

...Harold H. Zakon; Graciela A. Unguez ABSTRACT The electric organ has evolved independently from muscle in at least six lineages of fish. How does a differentiated muscle cell change its fate to become an electrocyte? Is the process by which this occurs similar in different lineages? We have begun...

... modulate the amplitude of their discharge seasonally and diurnally. The fact that electric signals do not propagate, but exist as electrostatic fields, means that, unlike sound signals, electric organ discharges produce no echoes or reverberations. Because temporal information is preserved during signal...

...Harold Zakon; Lynne McAnelly; G. Troy Smith; Kent Dunlap; Gregory Lopreato; Joerg Oestreich; W. Preston Few ABSTRACT Weakly electric fish emit electric organ discharges (EODs) to locate objects around themselves and for communication. The EOD is generated by a simple hierarchically organized...

...Michael J. Dowdall; A. Chris Green; C. Mark Richardson ABSTRACT The cholinergic innervation and its glial support were isolated in a functional state from the electric organ of the skate ( Raja species) using a combined enzymatic and mechanical dissociation technique. Examination using light...