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Study finds out how kinesthetic sense helps restore movement after spinal cord injury

A jawless fish known as a lamprey has attracted the attention of scientists for nearly 50 years. Despite only partially regenerating the brain, a recent study suggests a potential method by which lampreys can swim again after spinal cord injury.

Marine Biology Laboratory (MBL), Jennifer R Morgan and Christina Hamlet of Bucknell University have constructed a mathematical model that shows how lampreys can use feedback from the body to regain the ability to swim after a spinal cord injury. The work could suggest new therapeutic strategies for humans or locomotion algorithms for soft robots.

The article is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “The bottom line of the paper is that even without descending command through this [spinal] lesion, you can enhance sensory feedback and restore locomotion,” said Morgan, MBL Senior Scientist and director of the MBL Eugene Bell Center for Regenerative Biology and tissue engineering.

Unlike humans and other mammals, lampreys recover quickly and almost completely from severe lesions high in the spinal cord. Morgan previously found that while neural regeneration aids recovery in lampreys, it doesn’t tell the whole story. Only a small percentage of neurons and neuronal connections are regenerated after spinal cord injury, so they must use a different mechanism.

“I had all these questions about how it could work. How could you get a functioning nervous system with a few small sparse connections?” Morgan asked.

The researchers hypothesized that lampreys might use body-sensing feedback (called proprioception or kinesthesia) to guide their movements, in addition to descending neural connections in the spinal cord.

Morgan reached out to discuss this with her old MBL friend, Eric Tytell, an associate professor of biology at Tufts University and a former MBL Whitman Center investigator. Eric has already worked with Lisa Fauci, professor of mathematics at Tulane University, and Christina Hamlet, who co-supervised a postdoc at Tulane.

Tytell, Fauci, and Hamlet used mathematical models to mimic the movement of lampreys. They teamed up to “see if we could model some of the effects of sensory feedback on swimming in lampreys,” said Hamlet, who is currently an assistant professor of mathematics at Bucknell University.

The team began playing with different scenarios of spinally injured lampreys including both biologically plausible and implausible ones all of which assumed no neural regeneration across the spinal cord lesion. That’s the utility of modeling, Hamlet said, “We can break things you can’t break in biology.”

The model took into account the curves and stretches created in the body above the lesion and sent this information to the rest of the body through the muscles, not the spinal cord.

Even with modest amounts of sensory feedback, the models showed surprising recovery of swimming patterns in biologically plausible models. Stronger sensory feedback led to even greater improvement.

Since lampreys regrow some of their neurons after damage, and therefore have a descending command from the brain to control movement, they may need even less sensory feedback than the model. The team hopes to add neuronal regeneration to the model and test how this affects movement and interacts with sensory feedback.

“If you have a good computational model, you can go through many more manipulation scenarios than is practical with experimentation,” Morgan said.

The team hopes this study and future research will contribute to therapies for people with spinal injuries and diseases that affect movement. Brain-machine interfaces and stimulation devices are beginning to incorporate feedback from the body to create smoother movements after injury, and this research could inform the amount and type of feedback people need.

“Whether you’re an animal like a lamprey that [heals] spontaneously, or a human that needs to be given a drug or an electrical stimulator, you get to a point where you have a few things in the right place, and then you reuse what’s already there by more should have been achievable than trying to recapitulate the identical original pattern of synaptic connections and growth,” Morgan said.

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