Biotinylated dextran amine as a marker for fetal hypothalamic homografts and their efferents

Parallel trajectories in the discovery of the SCN-OVLT and pituitary portal pathways: Legacies of Geoffrey Harris

A map of central nervous system organization based on vascular networks provides a layer of organization distinct from familiar neural networks or connectomes. As a well-established example, the capillary networks of the pituitary portal system enable a route for small amounts of neurochemical signals to reach local targets by traveling along specialized pathways, thereby avoiding dilution in the systemic circulation. The first evidence of such a pathway in the brain came from anatomical studies identifying a portal pathway linking the hypothalamus and the pituitary gland. Almost a century later, we demonstrated a vascular portal pathway that joined the capillary beds of the suprachiasmatic nucleus and a circumventricular organ, the organum vasculosum of the lamina terminalis, in a mouse brain. For each of these portal pathways, the anatomical findings opened many new lines of inquiry, including the determination of the direction of flow of information, the identity of the signal that flowed along this pathway, and the function of the signals that linked the two regions. Here, we review landmark steps to these discoveries and highlight the experiments that reveal the significance of portal pathways and more generally, the implications of morphologically distinct nuclei sharing capillary beds.

Long-Term Survival and Outgrowth of Mechanically Engineered Nervous Tissue Constructs Implanted Into Spinal Cord Lesions

While most approaches to repair spinal cord injury (SCI) rely on promoting axon outgrowth, the extensive distance that axons would have to grow to bridge SCI lesions remains an enormous challenge. In this study, we used a new tissue-engineering technique to create long nervous tissue constructs spanned by living axon tracts to repair long SCI lesions. Exploiting the newfound process of extreme axon stretch growth, integrated axon tracts from dorsal root ganglia (DRG) neurons were mechanically elongated in vitro to 10 mm over 7 days and encased in a collagen hydrogel to form a nervous tissue construct. In addition, a modified lateral hemisection SCI model in the rat was developed to create a 1 cm long cavity in the spinal cord. Ten days following SCI, constructs were transplanted into the lesion and the animals were euthanized 4 weeks post-transplantation for histological analyses. Through cell tracking methods and immunohistochemistry, the transplanted elongated cultures were consistently found to survive 4 weeks in the injured spinal cord. In addition, DRG axons were observed extending out of the transplanted construct into the host spinal cord tissue. These results demonstrate the promise of nervous tissue constructs consisting of stretch-grown axons to bridge even extensive spinal cord lesions.

Fetal cortical allografts project massively through the adult cortex

Allogeneic embryonic CNS tissue grafts placed in the mature brain are classically considered to lack significant long-range efferents. This problem was reexamined using 'green' cells from mice expressing ubiquitously an 'enhanced' green fluorescent protein as an alternative to classical tract tracing methods. The present study shows that fetal cortical neurons (E15; occipital origin) grafted in the occipitoparietal region of the adult cortex project massively throughout ipsilateral telencephalic structures. Two out of the nine grafted subjects had additional but sparse efferents in the visual thalamus, superior colliculus and pons.