Spinal cord injury (SCI) is a devastating disease with no clear molecular mechanisms or effective treatments. Murine models of SCI have been widely used to explore its pathogenesis.

In this study, a comprehensive bioinformatic analysis using GEO datasets was performed to evaluate the characteristics of different SCI models.

We found that the contusion model was similar to the compression model, with inflammation and apoptosis significantly enriched, while more complex biological processes existed in hemisection and transection model. Inflammatory markers can be used as a primary evaluation index of SCI models not only in the acute and subacute phases, but also in the chronic phase. In the meantime, apoptosis markers are more suitable for evaluating mouse SCI models while inflammatory markers are more suitable for rat SCI models. In addition, SCI models with different ages, genders, injury positions, and injury levels were also analyzed.

Our findings indicate that SCI is a heterogeneous disease and play an instructive role in model selecting.

To identify transcriptomic alterations and therapeutic drugs in different organs after spinal cord injury via comprehensive bioinformatics analyses.

RNA-sequencing data of the soleus muscle, bladder, liver, raphe, and sensorimotor cortex areas in various rat spinal cord injury models were obtained from the Gene Expression Omnibus database for bioinformatics analysis. Then, the common pathways and biological pathway changes in multiple organs were identified.

By comparing the enrichment results of differentially expressed genes, inflammatory response and lipid metabolism were found to be significantly altered in multiple organs. The MAPK signaling pathway was a key pathway in the abovementioned biological processes. In addition, autonomous repair was observed in each organ. Finally, pharmacological analysis showed that coenzyme A might be an effective drug.

Coenzyme A is a candidate treatment drug for spinal cord injury. Hence, in addition to the current mechanisms targeted by anti-inflammatory approaches, lipid metabolism can also be a treatment target for spinal cord injury.