Growing Closer

The spinal cord is a bundle of nerves connecting the brain to the rest of the body, and injuries to those nerves can result in permanent paralyses of the corresponding body regions. Figuring out how to reconnect injured nerves in such patients is therefore a major goal. One idea is to provide a scaffold between the separated nerves to encourage the cells to grow towards each other and connect. In culture at least, the results of this approach seem promising. Shown are two pieces of mouse spinal cord tissue (blue) growing a millimetre or so apart in culture. Between them is a 3D carbon nanotube mesh (a favoured scaffold material) that has prompted the sprawling, intertwining outgrowths of nerve cells (yellow, green and red) and, consequently, their reconnection. Whether such mesh-guided reconnection would work and, if so, fix paralyses in living animals, however, is the next big question.

Written by Ruth Williams

Ruth Williams

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Ruth is a freelance science journalist based in the US. She's a regular correspondent for The Scientist, and her work has appeared in The Lancet, Nature, Scientific American Mind, BBC Focus and elsewhere. Twitter @rooph

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• Image from work by Sadaf Usmani and Emily Rose Aurand, and colleagues
• International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA/ISAS), and University of Trieste, Trieste, Italy
• Image originally published under a Creative Commons Licence (BY 4.0)
• Published in Science Advances, July 2016