Harvard Catalyst Profiles

Contact, publication, and social network information about Harvard faculty and fellows.

Electric Organ

"Electric Organ" is a descriptor in the National Library of Medicine's controlled vocabulary thesaurus, MeSH (Medical Subject Headings). Descriptors are arranged in a hierarchical structure, which enables searching at various levels of specificity.

In about 250 species of electric fishes, modified muscle fibers forming disklike multinucleate plates arranged in stacks like batteries in series and embedded in a gelatinous matrix. A large torpedo ray may have half a million plates. Muscles in different parts of the body may be modified, i.e., the trunk and tail in the electric eel, the hyobranchial apparatus in the electric ray, and extrinsic eye muscles in the stargazers. Powerful electric organs emit pulses in brief bursts several times a second. They serve to stun prey and ward off predators. A large torpedo ray can produce of shock of more than 200 volts, capable of stunning a human. (Storer et al., General Zoology, 6th ed, p672)


This graph shows the total number of publications written about "Electric Organ" by people in Harvard Catalyst Profiles by year, and whether "Electric Organ" was a major or minor topic of these publication.
Bar chart showing 18 publications over 12 distinct years, with a maximum of 2 publications in 1994 and 1998 and 1999 and 2000 and 2002 and 2015
To see the data from this visualization as text, click here.
Funded by the NIH National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences through its Clinical and Translational Science Awards Program, grant number UL1TR002541.