Morphological observations of motor units connected in-series to Golgi tendon organs.

The glycogen-depletion technique (17, 32) has been used to examine the functional and morphological relationships between single isolated motor units (MUs) and single isolated Golgi tendon organs (GTOs) that were excited by the MUs in the soleus muscle of the cat. All MUs whose twitch contraction generated a brisk discharge from the GTOs during the rising and plateau phase of force development had a muscle fiber attached specifically to the proximal end of the GTOs. A significant (P less than 0.05) linear relationship was found between GTO discharge rate and the cross-sectional area of the muscle fibers that connected to a receptor. This was true when the correlation was calculated between firing rate and 1) the cross-sectional area of the entire collection of muscle fibers that connected in series to the GTOs; and 2) for the cross-sectional areas of the individually depleted muscle fibers that inserted on the GTO sample. These findings support the notion that the most physiologically relevant input for GTOs arises from the MUs that are attached directly in-series with the receptor.