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Balloons and More! This quarter, we feature the lab of Dr. Dana McTigue, Assistant Professor in the Department of Neuroscience Research in the McTigue lab is focused on essential questions of repair and recovery after spinal cord injury. They are interested in the consequences of demyelination, or loss of the fatty insulation that allows neurons to communicate electrical signals within the spinal cord. Specialized glial cells, called oligodendrocytes, produce the myelin sheaths. The oligodendrocytes are especially vulnerable to cell death after trauma. Fortunately, there are progenitor cells in the spinal cord that can proliferate and differentiate into new oligodendrocytes and contribute to a modest level of repair. Dr. McTigue has been studying these oligodendrocyte progenitor cells, or OPCs, to determine how they respond to a clinically relevant spinal cord contusion injury and whether their repair capacity can be improved. NG2: An OPC marker and much more!
NG2 is a proteoglycan found on the OPCs when they are formed in development. In a paper published in 2006, Dr. McTigue's lab showed that cells that correspond to OPCs divide in the first week after spinal cord injury and express NG2. When they examined the injury site carefully, however, they found that, in addition to the progenitors, there were many other cell types that also expressed this marker. Because many studies in culture have shown that NG2 is inhibitory to axon growth, they looked to see if regrowing axons avoided the NG2-rich areas. The answer was clearly, no! Axons were found very closely associated with NG2 made by these other cell types. These findings are important because they show that there are different cell types that express similar markers after injury. Just outside of the lesion and in the white matter, where the axons have lost their myelin, there is a population of cells that resemble progenitors that might be stimulated to improve remyelination and repair.Link New oligodendrocytes are formed immediately adjacent to a contusion injury siteThe McTigue lab has a new paper in pressthat shows that the NG2 cells just outside of the site of a contusion injury proliferate and then differentiate into mature oligodendrocytes in surprisingly high numbers. The molecules and growth factors present at the site of injury appear to be important for stimulating these cells to become oligodendrocytes. By studying the factors that are present in this defined region, they hope to identify the signals that activate the program for remyelination. These findings can then be applied to improve remyelination in more distant regions of the spinal cord or to develop treatments for other neurological diseases that include demyelination.NG2-expressing cells (brown) are concentrated at the edges of a spinal cord injury 
Triple labeled confocal image of NG2 expression in the injured spinal cord. Yellow staining is where the inhibitory NG2 is co-localized with permissive laminin.Other research interests The border zone that is critical to the repair of the injured spinal cord is also an area of active inflammation after injury. In other research in the laboratory, Dr. McTigue is investigating the role of inflammation in the continued secondary injury that occurs after spinal cord trauma. Dr. McTigue's lab is located in the new Biomedical Research Tower. If you would like to learn more about their current research and future directions, please contact the CBSCR administrator at stenger.29@osu.edu. |
