Axonal branching and recovery of coordinated muscle activity after transection of the facial nerve in adult rats.

Facial nerve surgery inevitablyleads to pareses, abnormally associated movements, and pathologically altered reflexes. The reason for this "post-paralytic syndrome" is the misdirected reinnervation of targets, which consists of two major components. First, due to malfunctioning axonal guidance, a muscle gets reinnervated by a "foreign" axon, that has been misrouted along a "wrong" fascicle. Second, the supernumerary collateral branches emerging from all transected axons simultaneously innervate antagonistic muscles and cause severe impairment of coordinated activity. Since it is hardly possible to influence the first major component and improve the guidance of several thousands of axons, we concentrated on the second major component and tried to reduce the collateral axonal branching. The efficiency of various treatments was evaluated in rats by determining: (1) the degree of post-operative axonal branching as estimated by the number of double-or triple-labeled perikarya after application of crystalline DiI, Fluoro-Gold (FG), and Fast Blue (FB) to the zygomatic, buccal, and marginal mandibular branch of the facial nerve respectively; (2) the accuracy of reinnervation as estimated by the number of double-labeled perikarya innervating the whisker pad muscles before and after surgery as shown by intramuscular injections of FG and FB respectively; (3) the recovery of vibrissal motor performance, estimated by a video based motion analysis. So far, we have tried to reduce branching by alteration of the afferent trigeminal input to the axotomized facial motoneurons and by focal application of: (1) neurite outgrowth fostering ECM proteins; (2) neutralizing antibodies to NGF, BDNF, CNTF, GDNF, IGF-I, and FGF-II; (3) suspensions of olfactory ensheathing cells, Schwann cells, and bone marrow stroma cells; and (4) pieces of autologous olfactory mucosa to the transection site. Although most of these manipulations do influence peripheral nerve regeneration to some extent, only the application of autologous olfactory mucosa yielded a major improvement, i.e., better function.