Biology subjects

Landelle, C.

Publications and source records attributed to Landelle, C..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2025

Spinal cord structural and functional architecture and its shared organization with the brain across the adult lifespan

The spinal cord connects the brain to peripheral systems. Yet its integration with cerebral networks remains a key neuroscience question. Capturing structural and functional central nervous system (CNS) changes throughout the lifespan is essential for characterizing healthy and pathological aging. Leveraging a unique multimodal dataset combining spinal and cerebrospinal imaging, we jointly mapped the spinal cord structural and functional architecture across adulthood. Our results revealed age-related changes across these modalities and identified organizational principles shared with the brain. These changes were most pronounced in the somatosensory pathway, with microstructural decline coupled to shifts in functional connectivity and local spontaneous activity as aging progresses. Extending analyses to the brain uncovered convergent CNS-wide aging mechanisms, including gray matter loss, functional dedifferentiation, and increased spontaneous activity, highlighting shared neural aging trajectories. Together, our findings provide a systems-level view of alterations with age and lay the groundwork for early biomarkers of sensorimotor decline.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2025

Spine-Prints: Transposing Brain Fingerprints to the Spinal Cord

Functional connectivity (FC) patterns in the human brain form a reproducible, individual-specific "fingerprint" that allows reliable identification of the same participant across scans acquired over different sessions. While brain fingerprinting is robust across healthy individuals and neuroimaging modalities, little is known about whether the fingerprinting principle extends beyond the brain. Here, we used multiple functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) datasets acquired at different sites to examine whether a fingerprint can be revealed from FCs of the cervical region of the human spinal cord. Our results demonstrate that the functional organisation of this region also exhibits individual-specific properties, suggesting the potential existence of a spine-print within the same acquisition session. Although the spine-print scores are not directly comparable to those observed in the brain, this discrepancy may in part reflect the intrinsic limitations of imaging this region with fMRI, where where the signals are more susceptible to noise and effective resolution relative to structure size, and tSNR are markedly lower than in the brain.This study provides the first evidence of a spinal cord connectivity fingerprint, underscoring the importance of considering a more comprehensive view of the entire central nervous system. Eventually, these spine-specific signatures could contribute to identifying individualized biomarkers of neuronal connectivity, with potential clinical applications in neurology and neurosurgery.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2024

Cerebro-spinal somatotopic organization uncoveredthrough functional connectivity mapping

Somatotopy, the topographical arrangement of sensorimotor pathways corresponding to distinct body parts, is a fundamental feature of the human central nervous system (CNS). Traditionally, investigations into brain and spinal cord somatotopy have been conducted independently, primarily utilizing body stimulations or movements. To date, however, no study has probed the somatotopic arrangement of cerebro-spinal functional connections in vivo in humans. In this study, we used simultaneous brain and cervical spinal cord functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to demonstrate how the coordinated activities of these two CNS levels at rest can reveal their shared somatotopy. Using functional connectivity analyses, we mapped preferential correlation patterns between each spinal cord segment and distinct brain regions, revealing a somatotopic gradient within the cortical sensorimotor network. We then validated this large-scale somatotopic organization through a complementary data-driven analysis, where we effectively identified spinal cord segments through the connectivity profiles of their voxels with the sensorimotor cortex. These findings underscore the potential of resting-state cerebro-spinal cord fMRI to probe the large-scale organization of the human sensorimotor system with minimal experimental burden, holding promise for gaining a more comprehensive understanding of normal and impaired somatosensory-motor functions.

neuroscience↗