👤 Radhika Puttagunta

Following an acute central nervous system (CNS) injury, axonal regeneration and functional recovery are extremely limited. This is due to an extrinsic inhibitory growth environment and the lack of intrinsic growth competence. Retinoic acid (RA) signaling, essential in developmental dorsoventral patterning and specification of spinal motor neurons, has been shown through its receptor, the transcription factor RA receptor β2 (RARβ2), to induce axonal regeneration following spinal cord injury (SCI). Recently, it has been shown that in dorsal root ganglion neurons (DRGs), cAMP levels were greatly increased by lentiviral RARβ2 expression and contributed to neurite outgrowth. Moreover, RARβagonists, in cerebellar granule neurons (CGN) and in the brain in vivo, induced phosphoinositide 3-kinase dependent phosphorylation of AKT that was involved in RARβ-dependent neurite outgrowth. More recently, RA-RARβpathways were shown to directly transcriptionally repress a member of the inhibitory Nogo receptor (NgR) complex, Lingo-1, under an axonal growth inhibitory environment in vitro as well as following spinal injury in vivo. This perspective focuses on these newly discovered molecular mechanisms and future directions in the field. Show less

After an acute central nervous system injury, axonal regeneration is limited as the result of a lack of neuronal intrinsic competence and the presence of extrinsic inhibitory signals. The injury fragments the myelin neuronal insulating layer, releasing extrinsic inhibitory molecules to signal through the neuronal membrane-bound Nogo receptor (NgR) complex. In this paper, we show that a neuronal transcriptional pathway can interfere with extrinsic inhibitory myelin-dependent signaling, thereby promoting neurite outgrowth. Specifically, retinoic acid (RA), acting through the RA receptor β (RAR-β), inhibited myelin-activated NgR signaling through the transcriptional repression of the NgR complex member Lingo-1. We show that suppression of Lingo-1 was required for RA-RAR-β to counteract extrinsic inhibition of neurite outgrowth. Furthermore, we confirm in vivo that RA treatment after a dorsal column overhemisection injury inhibited Lingo-1 expression, specifically through RAR-β. Our findings identify a novel link between RA-RAR-β-dependent proaxonal outgrowth and inhibitory NgR complex-dependent signaling, potentially allowing for the development of molecular strategies to enhance axonal regeneration after a central nervous system injury. Show less