Grant: CIHR New Investigator

After a spinal cord injury, maintaining an upright posture during walking and attaining and sustaining even moderately fast walking speeds is difficult. These impairments could be partly the result of a defective coordination between the four limbs, also termed interlimb coordination. Despite this simple fact, the structures and pathways within the central nervous system involved in coordinating the four limbs are poorly understood, particularly in the injured spinal cord of adult mammals. This is mainly because we lack an effective model to study interlimb coordination after spinal cord injury. Our objective is to better understand the control of interlimb coordination during walking and its recovery following spinal cord injury. We will study interlimb coordination in an adult mammalian model (feline) of spinal cord injury using a treadmill that can independently control the walking speed of each limb, called a split-belt treadmill. Using novel experimental paradigms, we recently showed that interlimb coordination is flexible during locomotion and that centres within the spinal cord play an important role in coordinating the left and right sides. This proposal will directly build on and expand our recent findings by providing more details on the neural pathways involved in coordinating the four limbs. These pathways could be targeted by therapeutic strategies aimed specifically at strengthening interlimb coordination after spinal cord injury, which could directly improve functional recovery.