Respiratory function following bilateral mid-cervical contusion injury in the adult rat.

The consequences of spinal cord injury (SCI) are often viewed as the result of white matter damage. However, injuries occurring at any spinal level, especially in cervical and lumbar enlargement regions, also entail segmental neuronal loss. Yet, the contributions of gray matter injury and plasticity to functional outcomes are poorly understood.

Neuronal progenitor transplantation and respiratory outcomes following upper cervical spinal cord injury in adult rats.

Despite extensive gray matter loss following spinal cord injury (SCI), little attention has been given to neuronal replacement strategies and their effects on specific functional circuits in the injured spinal cord. In the present study, we assessed breathing behavior and phrenic nerve electrophysiological activity following transplantation of microdissected dorsal or ventral pieces of rat fetal spinal cord tissue (FSC(D) or FSC(V), respectively) into acute, cervical (C2) spinal hemisections. Transneuronal tracing demonstrated connectivity between donor neurons from both sources and the host phrenic circuitry.

Rapid discovery of putative protein biomarkers of traumatic brain injury by SDS-PAGE-capillary liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry.

We report the rapid discovery of putative protein biomarkers of traumatic brain injury (TBI) by SDS-PAGE-capillary liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (SDS-PAGE-Capillary LC-MS(2)). Ipsilateral hippocampus (IH) samples were collected from naive rats and rats subjected to controlled cortical impact (a rodent model of TBI). Protein database searching with 15,558 uninterpreted MS(2) spectra, collected in 3 days via data-dependent capillary LC-MS(2) of pooled cyanine dye-labeled samples separated by SDS-PAGE, identified more than 306 unique proteins.