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Updated: Oct 25, 2025

Morphological and Functional Evaluation of Axons and their Synapses during Axon Death in Drosophila melanogaster
Published on: March 16, 2020
The Drama of Wallerian Degeneration: The Cast, Crew, and Script
Kai Zhang1,2, Mingsheng Jiang1,2, Yanshan Fang1,2
1Interdisciplinary Research Center on Biology and Chemistry, Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 201203, China; email: zhangkai@sioc.ac.cn, jiangms@sioc.ac.cn, fangys@sioc.ac.cn.
Abstract:
Significant advances have been made in recent years in identifying the genetic components of Wallerian degeneration, the process that brings the progressive destruction and removal of injured axons. It has now been accepted that Wallerian degeneration is an active and dynamic cellular process that is well regulated at molecular and cellular levels. In this review, we describe our current understanding of Wallerian degeneration, focusing on the molecular players and mechanisms that mediate the injury response, activate the degenerative program, transduce the death signal, execute the destruction order, and finally, clear away the debris. By highlighting the starring roles and sketching out the molecular script of Wallerian degeneration, we hope to provide a useful framework to understand Wallerian and Wallerian-like degeneration and to lay a foundation for developing new therapeutic strategies to treat axon degeneration in neural injury as well as in neurodegenerative disease.
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