Identification of spinal afferent nerve endings in the colonic mucosa and submucosa that communicate directly with the spinal cord: The gut–brain axis

Abstract

This is the author manuscript accepted for publication and has undergone full peer review but has not been through the copyediting, typesetting, pagination and proofreading process, which may lead to differences between this version and the Version of Record. Please cite this article as

Morphological identification of thoracolumbar spinal afferent nerve endings in mouse uterus

“…The vast majority of thoracolumbar sensory innervation to the uterus appears to be peptidergic, since all identified spinal afferent axons and endings in this study co‐labeled with CGRP. This finding, however, does not preclude the existence of other nonpeptidergic uterine sensory nerve populations, as have been observed in other viscera (Spencer et al, 2020a). Most uterine spinal afferent endings also displayed varicosities, with only the occasional branching‐ and complex‐type endings being weakly or nonvaricose.…”

“…In these studies, DRG were individually injected with an anterograde tracer in live mice to visualize spinal afferent axons and nerve endings in the colorectum (Kyloh & Spencer, 2014; Spencer et al, 2014; Spencer et al, 2020a, 2020b), bladder (Spencer et al, 2018), stomach and esophagus (Spencer, Kyloh, et al, 2016), urethra (Barry et al, 2018), and long bones (Thai et al, 2020). In the colon, for example, these data uncovered an extremely complex array of nerve endings, which innervated different anatomical layers, including the smooth muscle, myenteric ganglia, submucosa, submucosal ganglia, and mucosa.…”

Cisplatin Mouse Models: Treatment, Toxicity and Translatability

“…Major sensory nerves that arise from the L4-L6 DRG neurons innervate the colon [120,160]. These DRG neurons are examined in cisplatin neuropathy studies.…”

Disengaging spinal afferent nerve communication with the brain in live mice

“…The surgical technique described here to expose DRG for their removal is the same technique that we use to inject DRG with neuronal tracers, for selective labelling of the axons and nerve endings of spinal afferents in visceral or somatic organs, down to single axon and nerve ending level 27 , 28 . Obviously, the difference between the two techniques is we do not remove the DRG, once we have injected DRGs with tracers.…”

“…Obviously, the difference between the two techniques is we do not remove the DRG, once we have injected DRGs with tracers. By injecting minute quantities of neuronal tracer into single DRG, it has been demonstrated we can readily identify the nerve endings that arise from a single DRG neuron 22 , 27 , 28 . This cannot be achieved using transgenic reporter or cre-induced expression of fluorescent reporters, which label large populations of axons whose spatial fields overlap extensively; see ref.…”