Fig. 3: Heterogeneous responses of neurons in the proximal and distal regions below the lesion after SCI.

a UMAP plot depicting twenty-eight subclusters of all neurons in the intact and injured spinal cord. The dashed lines indicate the neurotransmitter status. b Split UMAP plots depicting the harvested neuronal subsets in the uninjured spinal cord and different regions of the injured spinal cord. c Immunostaining of NeuN showing the distribution of survivable neurons in the injured rhesus monkey spinal cord at 7 dpi. The white scale labels the region with severe neuronal death. The dashed lines indicate the gray matter areas. The area in the white box is magnified. Scale bars in C1-C3, 200 μm. d The ratio of neuron number in different regions away from the injury site. e Pie plots showing the proportion of neurons with different neurotransmitters in the SA and SL area. f Immunostaining of GABA and NeuN in the lumbar spinal cord (left) and bar plot showing the proportion of GABA⁺ neurons among neurons at each phase after SCI (right). Scale bars, 100 μm. Data are shown as mean ± SEM, n = 5 slices. **p = 0.0011, ***p < 0.0001, one-way ANOVA coupled with Tukey’s post hoc test. g Bar plot showing the number of upregulated genes and downregulated genes of neurons in SA and SL area after SCI. h Heatmap showing the relative expression of axonogenesis genes (from top GO term) in neurons of SA and SL area. SYT1, MAP2, and SNAP25 were used as marker genes to indicate neuron identity. The color bar is scaled with the average expression of the corresponding genes. Source data are provided as a Source Data file.