Hopes that people with spinal injuries could one day regain leg movement have been raised by research in rats.
US, Russian and Swiss scientists used drugs and electrical stimulation to train the animals, whose spinal cords had been cut, to run on a treadmill.
Their movement was "almost indistinguishable" from normal steps, they said.
But the report, published in Nature Neuroscience, stressed the movement was not directly controlled by the mind.
Spinal injury - damaging or completely severing the nerves connecting the body's muscles to the brain - is one of the most intractable to surgery or drug treatment.
Scientists have known for some time that if a tiny electrical current is applied to the nerve just below the injury, it produces a muscle contraction.
However, the act of walking relies on a complex sequence of such contractions delivered at the right moment, so that the legs can carry the weight of the body forwards.
Hidden circuits
The earlier discovery that these patterns of motor signals may be partly governed in the spinal cord itself is the key to the latest research.
It is suggested that nerve circuits called "central pattern generators" may exist even at the base of the cord, underneath the point of the injury. Read more...
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