Wallerian degeneration: an emerging axon death pathway linking injury and disease

Motor axon excitability during Wallerian degeneration.

Axonal loss and degeneration are major factors in determining long-term outcome in patients with peripheral nerve disorders or injury. Following loss of axonal continuity, the isolated nerve stump distal to the lesion undergoes Wallerian degeneration in several phases. In the initial 'latent' phase, action potential propagation and structural integrity of the distal segment are maintained. The ...

A DLK-dependent axon self-destruction program promotes Wallerian degeneration

Microanatomy of axon/glial signaling during Wallerian degeneration.

How do myelinated axons signal to the nuclei of cells that enwrap them? The cell bodies of oligodendrocytes and Schwann cells are segregated from axons by multiple layers of bimolecular lipid leaflet and myelin proteins. Conventional signal transduction strategies would seem inadequate to the challenge without special adaptations. Wallerian degeneration provides a model to study axon-to-Schwann...

Axon degeneration: Linking axonal bioenergetics to myelin

The mechanisms by which axonal degeneration occurs, even in the presence of apparently normal myelin sheaths, remain unknown. In this issue, Yin et al. (2016. J. Cell Biol. https://doi.org/10.1083/jcb.201607099) study mutant mice in which proteolipid protein is replaced by the peripheral myelin protein P0 and describe a number of early axonal abnormalities, which together suggest that aberrant ...

Death Receptor 6 Promotes Wallerian Degeneration in Peripheral Axons

Axon degeneration during development is required to sculpt a functional nervous system and is also a hallmark of pathological insult, such as injury [1, 2]. Despite similar morphological characteristics, very little overlap in molecular mechanisms has been reported between pathological and developmental degeneration [3-5]. In the peripheral nervous system (PNS), developmental axon pruning relie...