Combining clinically common drugs with hindlimb stretching in spinal cord injured rodents.

Study Design: Preclinical pilot study.

Objectives: To explore peripheral and central nociceptive mechanisms that contribute to muscle stretch-induced locomotor deficits following spinal cord injury.

Setting: Kentucky Spinal Cord Injury Research Center, Louisville, KY, USA.

Identification and characterization of a potentially novel dorsal cutaneous muscle in rodents.

In the course of performing a detailed dissection of adult rat to map the cutaneous nerves of cervical, thoracic, and lumbar levels a small and unexpected structure was isolated. It appeared to be a cutaneous striated muscle and was observed in both male and female rats and in mice but absent from cats and humans. With the skin reflected laterally from midline, the muscle lies closely apposed to the lateral border of the Thoracic Trapezius (Spinotrapezius) muscle and is easily missed in standard gross dissections.

Construction of a Searchable Database for Gene Expression Changes in Spinal Cord Injury Experiments.

Spinal cord injury (SCI) is a debilitating condition with an estimated 18,000 new cases annually in the United States. The field has accepted and adopted standardized databases such as the Open Data Commons for Spinal Cord Injury (ODC-SCI) to aid in broader analyses, but these currently lack high-throughput data despite the availability of nearly 6000 samples from over 90 studies available in the Sequence Read Archive. This limits the potential for large datasets to enhance our understanding of SCI-related mechanisms at the molecular and cellular level.

Revealing the strengthening contribution of stacking faults, dislocations and grain boundaries in severely deformed LPBF AlSi10Mg alloy.

In this study, microstructural features direct metal laser melted (DMLM) aluminium-silicon-magnesium (AlSi10Mg) are investigated using advanced transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and high-resolution TEM (HRTEM). The focus is on post-processing by ECAP (Equal Channel Angular Pressing) and its effects on grain refinement, stacking fault formation and dislocation accumulation. In addition, the strength enhancing role of stacking faults is for the first time quantified.