Dorsal Root Injury for the Study of Spinal Cord Injury Repair

Dorsal root injury provides opportunities for highly reproducible lesions and for detailed anatomical, physiological, and behavioral outcome assessment with high precision and validity. Dorsal root injury models are used to several aspects of relevance to spinal cord injury repair: (1) mechanisms of regeneration failure in the central nervous system and how to overcome it; (2) axon degeneration, as well as myelin degradation and elimination in the central nervous system—their roles and possible manipulations in spinal cord repair; (3) consequences in the spinal cord of mimicking human plexus injuries by dorsal root avulsion, including its effect on neuron survival, inflammatory processes, and vascular dysfunction; and (4) therapeutic strategies which may be translated to the treatment of clinical plexus avulsion injuries. This chapter describes various dorsal root injury models, their relationship to basic and translational aspects of spinal cord injury repair, as well as basic experimental procedures associated with these models in rat and mouse.