Mechanisms of Motor Control in the Spinal Cord

National Institute Of Neurological Disorders And Stroke

Investigators

Linked publications & trials

Abstract

We seek to understand how the cells and circuits of the spinal cord encode neural programs for motor behavior. During this fiscal year, we made significant advances on two projects: (1) We established a gold standard reference of the cell types of the mouse spinal cord, using harmonized analysis of data from ten independent studies. Combined with high content in situ validation of dozens of marker genes, lineage analysis, and publicly available web resources to share this data, this work will serve as a foundational resource for spinal cord biology in the single cell era. In related work, we developed new computational analysis approaches for analyzing single cell data. (2) We used single cell techniques to track how each cell type in the spared tissue of the spinal cord changes following spinal cord injury. This work revealed two mechanisms of spontaneous recovery: a population of microglia that can be induced to phagocytose and clear myelin debris and a rare subset of neurons that, against the dogma in the field, represent central nervous system neurons that induce a molecular regeneration response. Both of these discoveries could provide new targets for therapeutic intervention.