Search bioRxiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/bioRxiv

bioRxiv · 10.1101/2024.11.13.623498

Curcumin attenuates microglia-mediated chronic neuropathic pain through CDK5 /p35 signaling pathway

Tong, F.·Zhao, l.·Yang, Y.·Zhang, Z.·Liu, L.·Wu, Y.·Di, X.·Xu, X.·Zhang, Y.·Shen, Y.·Yu, l.·Zhang, l.·Yao, Y.·Zhang, H.
View original source ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Curcumin is a phenolic compound derived from turmeric, one of the main ingredients of curry powder, which is widely used for its antioxidant, anti-inflammatory and immunomodulatory effects. Curcumin has been reported to help relieve pain, such as neuropathic pain caused by injury or disease, but the specific mechanism of its antinociceptive effect on pathological pain is unclear. Cyclin-dependent kinase 5 (Cdk5) is a key control point for the release of neurotransmitters from presynaptic vesicles. Cdk5 and its activator p35 couple to regulate key signaling cascades, thereby participating in the pain process. In this study, we established a NP model by chronic constriction injury (CCI) of the bilateral sciatic nerve in rats and evaluated behavioral hyperalgesia using mechanical and hot and cold tests. Protein expression and distribution were evaluated using western blotting and immunofluorescence. The results showed that Iba-1 and Cdk5/p35 were co-localized in the dorsal horn and dorsal root ganglia, respectively. After CCI, the expression of Cdk5 and p35 was upregulated in the dorsal horn and dorsal root ganglia, while intraperitoneal injection of curcumin significantly reversed the activation of Cdk5/p35 protein and alleviated the hyperalgesia in rats. In addition, the injection of curcumin reduced the co-localization expression of Iba-1 and Cdk5/p35, indicating that curcumin inhibited the activation of Cdk5/p35 protein in the dorsal horn and dorsal root ganglia, thereby affecting the activation of microglia, thereby having a destructive effect on the neuronal cell plasticity and synaptic structure remodeling in the development of NP. Our study provides new evidence that Cdk5/p35 in the dorsal horn and dorsal root ganglia is related to the occurrence of NP, introduces microglia as the basis for the long-term maintenance of NP, and provides insights into the molecular mechanisms involved in the analgesic effect of curcumin. Graphical Abstract O_FIG O_LINKSMALLFIG WIDTH=200 HEIGHT=188 SRC="FIGDIR/small/623498v1_ufig1.gif" ALT="Figure 1"> View larger version (80K): org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@125fc20org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@cba7d3org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@772291org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@17e87e3_HPS_FORMAT_FIGEXP M_FIG C_FIG

Explore related subjects

neurosciencePreprint

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Tong, F., Zhao, l., Yang, Y., Zhang, Z., Liu, L., Wu, Y., Di, X., Xu, X., Zhang, Y., Shen, Y., Yu, l., Zhang, l., Yao, Y., Zhang, H.. 2024-11-14. Curcumin attenuates microglia-mediated chronic neuropathic pain through CDK5 /p35 signaling pathway. https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.11.13.623498

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related preprints

bioRxiv2026

Same Movements, Different Skills: How Context Shapes Learning in Humans and Neural Networks

What determines whether experiences are integrated into shared representations or split? Motor skill learning offers a revealing test: when two tasks require an identical sequence of movements, both intuition and theory suggest that practice in one should generalize to the other. Yet we find that changing context can make identical movements different skills. In simple recurrent networks trained on the same sequence across contexts, splitting was greatest when strong contextual inputs coincided with a high initial weight scale; neither alone sufficed. Greater representational separation coincided with separate context-specific learning curves. Humans practicing the same finger sequence while alternating between two performance-irrelevant contexts likewise exhibited context-specific curves, rather than the single continuous trajectory observed when practicing in a single context. State-space modeling favored split learning states in humans and very weakly coupled states in the most context-dependent networks. These findings have broader implications for understanding how learning generalizes across contexts.

neuroscience↗
bioRxiv2026

Postpartum resource scarcity reshapes maternal care, offspring prioritization, and the steroid-sensitive medial preoptic area

Parental care requires balancing offspring needs with environmental constraints, yet how resource scarcity alters the organization of maternal responses remains poorly understood. Here, we examined maternal behavior, offspring prioritization, and steroid receptor-associated extracellular matrix organization in postpartum rats exposed to limited bedding and nesting (LBN) or control conditions with ample nesting materials. LBN increased pup-directed and reduced self-directed behaviors but also increased behavioral entropy, a measure of behavioral fragmentation, indicating less predictable caregiving sequences. LBN dams preferentially retrieved male pups first, whereas control dams preferentially retrieved females first. LBN also increased the proportion of pup-investigation time directed toward males compared with controls. In offspring on postnatal day 10, corticosterone was elevated in female but not male LBN pups, a pattern that paralleled the maternal male bias. To identify associated neurobiological changes, we assessed steroid receptors and extracellular matrix organization in the medial preoptic area (mPOA), a key region for maternal behavior. LBN increased numbers of estrogen receptor (ER)- and androgen receptor (AR)-immunoreactive cells, reduced perineuronal net (PNN) abundance, and decreased receptor-positive cell enwrapment. Because PNNs constrain structural plasticity, these findings suggest that the postpartum environment alters the organization of steroid receptor-associated extracellular matrix, potentially modulating experience-dependent plasticity in neurosteroid-sensitive circuits. In sum, LBN increases the levels of maternal engagement while reshaping its temporal organization and allocation, accompanied by selective remodeling of steroid-sensitive preoptic architecture. Therefore, maternal adaptation to adversity may be better understood as changes in caregiving allocation strategies rather than a simple gain or loss of maternal care.

neuroscience↗
bioRxiv2026

The Computational Grammar of Human Behaviour in a Biological Environment

Human behaviour unfolds as an extended stream of spontaneous actions shaped by environmental demands and the agent's goals. The organisation of these actions, situated between setting abstract goals and concrete movement execution, remains poorly characterised. Here, we introduce DynaClade, an unsupervised temporal action segmentation algorithm for human full-body motion capture data, and apply it to freely moving participants navigating ecologically realistic risky foraging environments in virtual reality. DynaClade identifies discrete actions whose kinematic characteristics and spatial distributions correspond to environmental affordances, supporting the validity of the approach. Among these actions, we discovered a hitherto undescribed movement pattern defined by increased body sway without locomotion. Action sequences were highly non-random and showed clear history dependence beyond first-order Markov structure, most of which was explained by a second-order prediction. This higher-order structure was well captured in a hidden Markov model, in which some of the observed actions were associated with more than one latent state. Each of these latent states corresponded to the same action in a distinct action context. These findings suggest that spontaneous human actions are predominantly selected based on the current action and context, rather than following pre-planned or habitually assembled sequences.

neuroscience↗