Functional Trajectories during innate spinal cord repair.
Nicholas O JensenBrooke BurrisLili ZhouHunter YamadaCatrina ReyesMayssa H MokalledPublished in: bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology (2023)
Adult zebrafish are capable of anatomical and functional recovery following severe spinal cord injury. Axon growth, glial bridging and adult neurogenesis are hallmarks of cellular regeneration during spinal cord repair. However, the correlation between these cellular regenerative processes and functional recovery remains to be elucidated. Whereas the majority of established functional regeneration metrics measure swim capacity, we hypothesize that gait quality is more directly related to neurological health. Here, we performed a longitudinal swim tracking study for sixty individual zebrafish spanning eight weeks of spinal cord regeneration. Multiple swim parameters as well as axonal and glial bridging were integrated. We established rostral compensation as a new gait quality metric that highly correlates with functional recovery. Tensor component analysis of longitudinal data supports a correspondence between functional recovery trajectories and neurological outcomes. Moreover, our studies predicted and validated that a subset of functional regeneration parameters measured 1 to 2 weeks post-injury is sufficient to predict the regenerative outcomes of individual animals at 8 weeks post-injury. Our findings established new functional regeneration parameters and generated a comprehensive correlative database between various functional and cellular regeneration outputs.
Keyphrases
- stem cells
- spinal cord
- spinal cord injury
- neuropathic pain
- mesenchymal stem cells
- depressive symptoms
- public health
- wound healing
- immune response
- type diabetes
- healthcare
- adipose tissue
- machine learning
- emergency department
- quality improvement
- cerebral ischemia
- metabolic syndrome
- young adults
- cross sectional
- risk assessment
- artificial intelligence
- human health
- childhood cancer
- insulin resistance
- social media
- optic nerve