Intracellular recording and staining techniques were applied to the study of cat phrenic motoneurons. Spontaneously driven phrenic cells possessed individualistic depolarization and spiking patterns that were a function of the conduction velocity in the different motor axons. Staining of phrenic motoneurons with Procion yellow indicated that fast conducting cells with small slow-wave depolarizations were large in size while slow conducting cells with large depolarizations were small in size. This implicated differences in membrane input resistance between large and small cells, although an unequal distribution of inputs to the individual components could not be discounted. On the average, phrenic motoneurons had a smaller dendritic surface area and smaller dendritic dominance than lumbosacral motoneurons. These factors help to explain the higher membrane resistances and longer time constants of phrenic cells. Phrenic dendrites were found to project in all directions away from the cell body and form ellipsoidal receptive fields that overlapped with other phrenic fields. It is speculated that the close approximation of phrenic dendrites with one another could, in part, be responsible for the high degree of synchronization among the different phrenic units.
Total blood flow and perfusion pressure (PP) of the internal maxillary artery (IMA) were recorded bilaterally during electrical stimulation (8 V, 2ms) of the right cervical sympathetic nerve at frequencies (f) of 0.3, 0.5, 1.0 and 3.0 Hz in anesthetized, paralyzed and artificially ventilated dogs. Distribution of IMA-FLOW to precapillaries (CAP-FLOW) and arteriovenous anastomoses (AVA-FLOW) was determined by the tracer microspheres technique. During electrical stimulation (ES) IMA-FLOW was affected only unilaterally and decreased in a hyperbola-like fashion with the increase of f, while contralateral IMA-FLOW remained unchanged. Systemic blood pressure as well as PP of both IMA remained unchanged while heart rate was only increased during ES at maximal f. The reduction of IMA-FLOW was mainly due to marked vasoconstrictor responses of the AVAs, which were already attained at low f while significant vasoconstrictor responses of precapillaries occurred at higher f and were less pronounced. The early response of AVAs to increasing sympathetic activation enables IMA-FLOW to be adjusted in a physiological range of sympathetic activities, before CAP-FLOW is substantially reduced. The predominance of AVA-FLOW in blood flow control of the IMA was also supported by the conformity in their hyperbolic relationship with maxillary resistance at rest and during enhanced levels of sympathetic vasoconstrictor activity.
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