Effects of sodium on transmitter release myoneural junctions in frog skeletal muscle.

Although the first experimental demonstration of neuromuscular transmission was made in the second century A. D. by Galen (see Fulton 1926, chapter 1) the highly specialized nature of the neuromuscular junction remained unknown until the middle of the nineteenth century. Then in 1847 Wagner (see Couteaux 1960) discovered that motor nerve terminals, unlike their parent axons, are unmyelinated, and later work by Kuhne (1888) revealed that they lie in invaginations of the muscle fibre surface. The finding of Sokolow (1874) that chronic denervation causes motor nerve terminal degeneration and disappearance without affecting muscle fibre structure further illustrated structural specificity by suggesting a discontinuity between motor nerve terminal and muscle fibre. [...