Serotonergic projections to lumbar levels and its plasticity following spinal cord injury

The descending serotonergic pathway, which originates in various populations of brainstem neurons, plays an important role in generating the rhythmic motor pattern associated with locomotor movement. Although the development of its innervation has been studied in rodent spinal cord, it has not been clearly identified how the projection of serotonergic pathway is related to its function. Here, we evaluated the pattern of serotonergic innervation on the lumbar spinal cord from embryonic day 14.5 (E14.5) to adulthood. Before birth, we found that 5-hydroxytryptamine (5-HT) fibers invade the lumbar cord as early as E14.5, penetrate into the gray matter from lateral funiculus by E16.5, and then mainly occupied the ventral horn by E18.5 before localizing in the dorsal horn. After birth, we found that 5-HT invasion of both dorsal horn and ventral horn were present by the 7th postnatal day (P7). Additionally, the 5-HT innervation of these two areas evolved progressively from a diffuse network to a more restricted pattern, particularly at the ventral horn within the motoneuron area from P21 to adulthood. This 5-HT innervation pattern in the lumbar cord provides anatomical evidence that serotonergic fibers establish direct connections with lumbar motoneurons, which offers us a solid foundation that enhancing the plasticity of serotonergic pathway following SCI may facilitate locomotor functional recovery. Therefore, we employed treadmill training to activate serotonergic plasticity after SCI. We found that mice which underwent treadmill training exhibited a better locomotor functional recovery. Meanwhile, the density of 5-HT fibers in the ventral horn was significantly increased and the synaptic formation of 5-HT fibers with lumbar motoneurons was also significantly rescued in the training group mice after SCI. These findings demonstrate that the descending serotonergic projection is a robust and flexible parallel pathway for modulating spinal locomotor function.