(l to r) Karthik Shekhar, Wenjun Yan, Irene Whitney, Inbal Benhar, Josh Sanes, Nicholas Tran, and Anne Jacobi (Courtesy of Molecular and Cellular Biology)

New research from the labs of Joshua Sanes, Zhigang He and colleagues provides novel insights into the CNS injury response of axons and how it might be improved. Using the optic nerve as a model, the team conducted single cell expression profiling experiments to study how different types of retinal ganglion cells (RGCs) differ in their resilience to injury. By mapping genes expressed in each of over 35,000 individual RGCs, the researchers identified genes that confer resilience or vulnerability and demonstrated that they could promote increased RGC survival by altering the expression of those key genes.

“These gratifying results provide new targets than can be explored further to see if any might be used in other cases of injury or in neurodegenerative disease,” Sanes explains, in a news post for the Molecular and Cellular Biology Department at Harvard. “More generally, they introduce a new strategy that can be used to find ways to protect damaged neurons.”

Joint lead authors on the study were Nicholas Tran, Karthik Shekhar, Irene Whitney and Anne Jacobi.

Read the Molecular and Cellular Biology Department story, “Weathering the storm of axonal injury” >>
Read the original research report in Neuron, Single-Cell Profiles of Retinal Ganglion Cells Differing in Resilience to Injury Reveal Neuroprotective Genes >>

Photo above courtesy of Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology.