Abstract
Due to their renowned regenerative capacity, adult zebrafish are a premier vertebrate model to interrogate mechanisms of innate spinal cord regeneration. Following complete transection to their spinal cord, zebrafish extend glial and axonal bridges across severed tissue, regenerate neurons proximal to the lesion, and regain swim capacity within 8 weeks of injury. Here, we describe methods to perform complete spinal cord transections and to assess functional and cellular recovery during regeneration. For spinal cord injury, a complete transection is performed 4 mm caudal to the brainstem. Swim endurance is quantified as a central readout of functional spinal cord repair. For swim endurance, zebrafish are subjected to a constantly increasing water current velocity until exhaustion, and time at exhaustion is reported. To assess cellular regeneration, histological examination is performed to analyze the extents of glial and axonal bridging across the lesion.
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Acknowledgments
This research was supported by grants from NIH (R01 NS113915), the Curators of the University of Missouri (Spinal Cord Injury and Disease Training Program), and funds from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.
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© 2024 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature
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Burris, B., Mokalled, M.H. (2024). Spinal Cord Injury and Assays for Regeneration. In: Amatruda, J.F., Houart, C., Kawakami, K., Poss, K.D. (eds) Zebrafish. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 2707. Humana, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-3401-1_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-3401-1_14
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