Proprioception revisited: where do we stand?

Originally referred to as ‘muscle sense’, the notion that skeletal muscle held a peripheral sensory function was first described early in the 19th century. Foundational experiments by Sherrington in the early 20th century definitively demonstrated that proprioceptors contained within skeletal muscle, tendons, and joints are innervated by sensory neurons and play an important role in the control of movement. In this review, we will highlight several recent advances in the ongoing effort to further define the molecular diversity underlying the proprioceptive sensorimotor system. Together, the work summarized here represents our current understanding of sensorimotor circuit formation during development and the mechanisms that regulate the integration of proprioceptive feedback into the spinal circuits that control locomotion in both normal and diseased states.

骨骼肌具有外周感觉功能这一概念最初被称为“肌肉感觉”，于19世纪早期首次被描述。20世纪早期谢林顿（Sherrington）所做的基础性实验明确表明，骨骼肌、肌腱和关节内包含的本体感受器受感觉神经元支配，并且在运动控制中起重要作用。在这篇综述中，我们将重点介绍在进一步确定本体感受感觉运动系统背后的分子多样性的持续努力中所取得的一些最新进展。总之，这里所总结的工作代表了我们目前对发育过程中感觉运动回路形成的理解，以及对在正常和疾病状态下调节本体感受反馈整合到控制运动的脊髓回路中的机制的理解。