ANN ARBOR— Picking up a pencil, running a marathon, even the simple act of breathing” every time we move a muscle we depend on a series of finely-tuned interactions at the junction of nerve fiber and muscle cell.

When something goes wrong in that pathway, as happens in diseases such as myasthenia gravis or with exposure to nerve gas, the result can be paralysis or death by asphyxiation.

In a recent series of papers, the latest published in the April 14 issue of the Journal of Biological Chemistry, University of Michigan researcher Mohammed Akaaboune and colleagues describe how they’ve used innovative imaging techniques to study nerve-muscle interactions in living animals, yielding some surprising findings