Welcome to the Plant Lab!

A compelling question in the field of SCI research is: if severed axons can be regrown just beyond the lesion site, how much functional benefit does this realistically offer a SCI patient? There have been several efforts to correlate the return of function with new axonal growth, but many have left unanswered the question of whether these axons re-establish appropriate functional connections between the deactivated cortical motor neurons and the limbs they once innervated. In addition, these therapeutics are not typically constrained to a specific neuron or fiber population, it remains unknown if there are variables secondary to our treatments that could instead be directly manipulated to more effectively induce functional recovery.