Top-Down Motor Control in Health and Disease: Cross-Sectional Insights from Spinal Cord Injury, ALS, and Neurodegeneration

Voluntary movement relies on descending command signals from supraspinal centers acting on spinal circuits. This top-down control architecture is disrupted in fundamentally different ways across neurological diseases, including direct mechanical disruption of descending white matter tracts in spinal cord injury (SCI), progressive degeneration of upper and lower motor neurons in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), and impaired modulation of descending drive in basal ganglia and movement disorders. Despite distinct etiologies, these conditions converge on a common functional challenge: the failure of descending commands to appropriately recruit and coordinate spinal motor circuits.Recent breakthroughs in viral circuit mapping, targeted neurotechnologies such as epidural electrical stimulation and brain-spine interfaces, optogenetics, and emerging insights into spinal fluid clearance now allow researchers to interrogate and restore these pathways with unprecedented precision. This Research Topic aims to bring together preclinical neurobiologists, clinical neurophysiologists, and translational clinician-scientists to build a cohesive mechanistic and functional picture of how top-down motor pathways fail across trauma and neurodegeneration, and how descending motor drive can be preserved, modulated, or restored.We welcome articles addressing the following themes:- Anatomical and functional characterization of descending motor pathways (corticospinal, reticulospinal, vestibulospinal) and their spinal interneuronal targets- Cellular and axonal mechanisms of motor tract degeneration in traumatic spinal cord injury and ALS- Compensatory plasticity and circuit reorganization following acute tract disruption versus progressive neurodegenerative disease- Neuromodulation and bioengineering approaches (epidural, transcutaneous, brainstem, or deep brain stimulation) for restoring or modulating descending motor drive- Neurofluid dynamics, cerebrospinal fluid flow, and interstitial solute clearance in spinal tissue homeostasis, edema resolution, and descending tract preservation- Electrophysiological and neuroimaging biomarkers tracking top-down motor tract integrity and recovery across patient cohorts- Translational and preclinical models bridging rodent circuit-mapping discoveries with human motor control deficits- Emerging genetic, cellular, and viral-vector strategies for targeting specific spinal neuronal subtypes to promote functional motor recovery Topic editors: Jaspreet Kaur, Graciela L Mazzone Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/87112/top-down-motor-control-in-health-and-disease-cross-sectional-insights-from-spinal-cord-injury-als-and-neurodegeneration