Satisfactory treatment of peripheral nerve injury (PNI) faces difficulties owing to the intrinsic biological barriers in larger injuries and invasive surgical interventions. Injury gaps >3 cm have low chances of full motor and sensory recovery, and the unmet need for PNI repair techniques which increase the likelihood of functional recovery while limiting invasiveness motivate this work. Building upon prior work in ultrasound stimulation (US) of dorsal root ganglion (DRG) neurons, the effects of US on DRG neuron and Schwann cell (SC) cocultures were investigated to uncover the role of SCs in mediating the neuronal response to US in vitro. Acoustic intensity‐dependent alteration in selected neuromorphometrics of DRG neurons in coculture with SCs was observed in total outgrowth, primary neurites, and length compared to previously reported DRG monoculture in a calcium‐independent manner. SC viability and proliferation were not impacted by US. Conditioned medium studies suggest secreted factors from SCs subjected to US impact DRG neuron morphology. These findings advance the current understanding of mechanisms by which these cell types respond to US, which may lead to new noninvasive US therapies for treating PNI.

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The neurons of the Thalamic Reticular Nucleus (TRNn) respond to inputs in two activity modes called burst and tonic firing and both can be observed in different physiological states. The functional states of the thalamus depend in part on the properties of synaptic transmission between the TRNn and the thalamocortical and corticothalamic neurons. A dendrite can receive inhibitory and excitatory postsynaptic potentials. The novelties presented in this paper can be summarized as follows: First, it shows, through a computational simulation, that the burst and tonic firings observed in the TRNn soma could be explained as a product of random synaptic inputs on the distal dendrites, the tonic firings are generated by random excitatory stimuli, and the burst firings are generated by two different types of stimuli: inhibitory random stimuli, and a combination of inhibitory (from TRNn) and excitatory (from corticothalamic and thalamocortical neurons) random stimuli; second, according to in vivo recordings, we have found that the burst observed in the TRNn soma has graduate properties that are proportional to the stimuli frequency; and third, a novel method for showing in a quantitative manner the accelerando-decelerando pattern is proposed.

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