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Motor commands issued by the brain to activate arm muscles
take two different routes. As the research group led by Professor Silvia Arber
at the University of Basel's Biozentrum and the Friedrich Miescher Institute
for Biomedical Research has now discovered, many neurons in the spinal cord
send their instructions not only towards the musculature, but at the same time
also back to the brain via an exquisitely organized network. This dual
information stream provides the neural basis for accurate control of arm and
hand movements. These findings have now been published in Cell.