ABSTRACT
Objective To establish a model of injury to primarily cultured spinal cord neurons,mimicking the neuronal injury after complete transactional spinal cord trauma,for the sake of exploring changes in expression of an immediately-early gene,c-jun,in central nervous system injury. Methods Spinal cords were removed form fetal Wistar rats at the 14th gestation day and the neurons were cultured for 10 to 12 days.Then,mechanical injury was applied to the neurons by making regular scores on the culture disk under direct vision with the aid of a self-made standard template.Morphology of the injured neurons and changes in expression of c-Jun protein were observed before and at different intervals after injury. Results c-Jun expression was noted in neuronal nuclei 10 min after injury and its peak appeared at 2 hrs.Besides,the density of positive neurons bore evidently an inverse proportion with their distance from the scores.Conclusion\ Positive expression in injury neurons show that c-jun gene enters the nucleoli of injured neurons and takes the role of “the third messenger” at early time after neuronal injury.