Charlotte Bichara

KU Leuven | ku leuven · Department of Neurosciences

Neurocircuits within the spinal cord are essential for movement automaticity. However, spinal mechanisms that underlie lasting sensorimotor adjustments remain unclear. Here, we establish a quantitative kinematic framework to characterize a conditioning behavior in which spinal circuits without brain input learn to adapt motor output upon multimodal...

It is generally assumed that the main function of the corticospinal tract (CST) is to convey motor commands to bulbar or spinal motoneurons. Yet the CST has also been shown to modulate sensory signals at their entry point in the spinal cord through primary afferent depolarization (PAD). By sequentially investigating different routes of corticofugal...

Endogenous acetylcholine (ACh) is an important modulator of nociceptive sensory processing in the spinal cord. An increased level of spinal ACh induces analgesia both in humans and rodents while interfering with cholinergic signaling is allodynic, demonstrating that a basal tone of spinal ACh modulates nociceptive responses in naïve animals. The pl...

Un mouvement coordonné repose non seulement sur une commande motrice appropriée, mais aussi sur l'analyse en direct des informations multi-sensorielles reçues. Le tractus cortico-spinal (CST) est soupçonné d’être responsable de ces fonctions. Le but de ma thèse a été de comprendre comment le contrôle cortical des entrées sensorielles s’organise aut...

Objective Recent studies carried on amyotrophic lateral sclerosis patients suggest that the disease may initiate in the motor cortex and spread to its targets along the corticofugal tracts. In this study, we aimed at experimentally testing the corticofugal hypothesis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Methods Sod1 G86R and Fezf2 knockout mouse line...

At the spinal cord level, a tone of endogenous acetylcholine (ACh) modulates nociceptive sensory processing. Increasing the level of spinal ACh induces analgesia in naïve animals or in situation of acute pain in the clinics, but whether this is still the case in situations or models of chronic pain is controversial. Here, we demonstrate the persist...

It is generally assumed that the main function of the corticospinal tract (CST) is to convey motor commands to bulbar or spinal motoneurons. Yet the CST has also been shown to modulate sensory signals at their entry point in the spinal cord, through primary afferent depolarization (PAD). By sequentially investigating different routes of corticofuga...

Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) is a fatal neurodegenerative disease of adulthood that affects voluntary motricity and rapidly leads to full paralysis and death. ALS arises from the combined degeneration of motoneurons in the spinal cord and brain stem, responsible for muscle denervation, and corticospinal projection neurons (CSN), responsible...