Project Wolverine & Project Piccolo: Mapping Spinal Cord Recovery at Smith

Smith may be far from the coast, but every summer students on campus still SURF. Through the college’s 10-week Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF), undergraduates are paired with faculty mentors to conduct cutting-edge research that is often reserved for graduate-level study. 

This year, students in Assistant Professor of Neuroscience Cagney Coomer’s lab are investigating one of neuroscience's biggest questions: How does the nervous system rebuild itself after a spinal cord injury?

Working across two complementary research projects—Project Piccolo and Project Wolverine—a team of four students explores how damaged neural circuits regenerate and what distinguishes successful recovery from incomplete repair. Together, the projects aim to uncover the biological rules that govern how the nervous system reconnects after injury, insights that could one day lead to more effective treatments for spinal cord injuries.  

Project Piccolo focuses on synapses, the tiny connections that allow nerve cells to communicate. The project asks a key question: Do synapses become functional before axons—the long fibers that carry signals between neurons—fully regenerate? Advanced biosensors, structural fluorescent markers, and fluorescent reporters like iGluSnFR, Synaptophysin-GFP, and PSD-95-GFP are used to track the structure and function of synapses during regeneration. Students map the locations to verify whether synapses appear in the right place, track the stability of synapses over time, and measure when they become functionally active. By understanding the sequence of rebuilding, the team hopes to identify how healthy neural connections are restored and generate insights that could eventually guide therapies to improve recovery while reducing chronic pain and other long-term complications.

Project Wolverine examines whether spinal cord circuits rewire back to what they were before injury. Using GCaMP8m, a protein-based tool used in neuroscience and cell biology to detect and measure changes in intracellular calcium levels, the team probes what happens to neuron activity immediately after injury, how local circuits reorganize over time, and which changes in activity are linked to recovery of movement. Coomer and the research students believe that understanding these early steps of cellular recovery could transform how we approach physical therapy and other treatments for paralysis.

Coomer recently reflected on her lab’s summer breakthroughs, the power of undergraduate research, and the pop-culture inspiration behind her projects.

Who are the students you are working with? 
“My SURF students are Zelah Booker ’29, Lana Clarke ’28, Mia Boydston ’27, and Yuki Yang ’27, who worked a little earlier in the summer.” 

What makes working with Smith undergrads on high-level projects like Piccolo and Wolverine unique compared to traditional lab settings?
“I think one of the most distinctive aspects of my lab is that Smith undergraduates are not treated as assistants on someone else’s project. They are genuine contributors to ambitious scientific questions that are typically reserved for graduate students and postdoctoral researchers. Projects like Piccolo, Wolverine, and the other lab programs are intentionally designed so that undergraduates can own a meaningful piece of a larger scientific story while learning techniques that span molecular biology, advanced microscopy, computational neuroscience, and quantitative data analysis. Ultimately, I want the Coomer Lab to demonstrate that a primarily undergraduate institution can tackle cutting-edge neuroscience while providing students with an authentic, high-level research experience. Rather than asking what undergraduates are capable of, we design projects that allow them to exceed those expectations.” 

How does this research impact the future of spinal cord injury recovery?
“Current approaches to spinal cord injury research often measure recovery by whether movement returns. Our research asks a deeper question: Does the nervous system rebuild itself the same way it was before injury, or does it find a new solution? By watching individual synapses, local spinal circuits, and whole-brain networks regenerate in real time, we hope to identify the rules that govern successful recovery. Understanding these rules could reveal why some forms of rewiring restore normal function while others lead to chronic pain, spasticity, or incomplete recovery. Ultimately, this knowledge may guide future therapies that not only promote regeneration, but also direct neural circuits to reconnect in ways that restore healthy function.”

What is your favorite “aha!” moment you’ve witnessed a student have in the lab this summer?
“My favorite ‘aha!’ moments are rarely when an experiment works. They’re when a student realizes they’re no longer just following a protocol, they’re actually thinking like a scientist. This summer, I watched students make that transition as they began connecting individual experiments to the larger question our lab is trying to answer. Instead of asking, ‘What’s the next step?’ they started asking, ‘What does this result tell us about how the nervous system rebuilds itself?’ Seeing that shift in curiosity and confidence is incredibly rewarding because that’s the moment they stop seeing themselves as students helping with research and start seeing themselves as scientists making discoveries.”

What is the origin of the names Piccolo and Wolverine?
“I've always been fascinated by regeneration. As a kid, I was captivated by characters who can heal from impossible injuries, regrow lost limbs, and keep fighting. As a scientist, that fascination never really went away. It simply evolved into a different question: If living tissues can regenerate, why can’t we fully repair the nervous system?

“That’s why all of the projects in my lab are named after comic book characters with regenerative abilities. They’re more than fun names. They remind us of the bigger goal we’re chasing: understanding how biology repairs itself after damage and how we might one day harness those principles to treat injuries of the brain and spinal cord.

“Project Wolverine is named after the classic symbol of regeneration. His healing factor makes recovery seem effortless, but our project asks a much deeper question: When the spinal cord regenerates, does it rebuild the exact same neural circuits that existed before injury, or does it create a new circuit that simply produces the same behavior?

“Project Piccolo draws inspiration from his ability to regenerate entire limbs. That project focuses on rebuilding communication between neurons, asking whether new synapses can become functional before the nervous system has completely reconstructed its original architecture.

“The comic names also make the science memorable for students. They create an immediate connection between the stories that inspired many of us as children and the real biological mysteries we’re trying to solve today. In many ways, our lab is asking whether biology has its own version of a healing factor, and if it does, how we can learn from it to help people recover after nervous system injury.”