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Widening Spinal Injury Research To Consider All Supraspinal Cell Types: Why We Must And How We Can, Murray G. Blackmore, Eliazbeth Batsel, Pantelis Tsoulfas

Biomedical Sciences Faculty Research and Publications

The supraspinal connectome consists of dozens of neuronal populations that project axons from the brain to the spinal cord to influence a wide range of motor, autonomic, and sensory functions. The complexity and wide distribution of supraspinal neurons present significant technical challenges, leading most spinal cord injury research to focus on a handful of major pathways such as the corticospinal, rubrospinal, and raphespinal. Much less is known about many additional populations that carry information to modulate or compensate for these main pathways, or which carry pre-autonomic and other information of high value to individuals with spinal injury. A confluence of …