Mammals, from tiny rodents to humans, never usually recover from serious spinal cord or other central nervous system injuries. Except, it seems, for the African spiny mouse.

Microglia promote maladaptive plasticity in autonomic circuitry after spinal cord injury in mice. Science Translational Medicine, 2024; 16 (751) DOI: 10.1126/scitranslmed.adi3259 ...

More information: Ming-Dong Zhang et al, Neural ensembles that encode nocifensive mechanical and heat pain in mouse spinal cord, Nature Neuroscience (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41593-025-01921-6.

Aya Takeoka at the RIKEN Center for Brain Science (CBS) in Japan and colleagues have discovered the neural circuitry in the spinal cord that allows brain-independent motor learning.

I t was a shot in the dark — or at best, a dimly lit room: injecting a mouse with a little bit of spinal cord fluid from someone with the most common form of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ...

Further encouraged by these results, they explored whether similar effects could be observed in other mouse models of neuronal loss and degeneration, such as Alzheimer's disease and spinal cord injury ...

Fluorescence imaging can reveal details of neuronal activity in sections of the spinal cords of animals, but collecting data from living subjects can be challenging. Developments in micro-optics ...

They used six types of transgenic mice, each with a different set of spinal neurons disabled, and tested them for motor learning and learning reversal. They found that mice hindlimbs did not adapt to ...

A molecule created by researchers can restore lost connections in the spinal cord and brain of mice with neurological disorders including cerebellar ataxia, Alzheimer's disease and spinal cord injury.

Researchers at the RIKEN Center for Brain Science (CBS) in Japan and colleagues have discovered the neural circuitry in the spinal cord that allows brain-independent motor learning. Published in ...