Stem Cells Into Brain Cells?
Related News: Spinal / Nervous / BrainResearchers are announcing that they have found a way to coax adult hair follicle stem cells into becoming brain cells. The research means these potentially precious cells may be everywhere there's hair.
Digging around a bit, I believe these are also what are known as neural crest stem cells. Will need to verify this one ...
The researchers at AntiCancer, Inc. in San Diego have coaxed adult stem cells in mice into turning into neurons. Writing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the authors say, the results of their work suggests a new "source of undifferentiated multi-potent stem cells."
Many scientists are working to grow tissue from adult stem cells in order to avoid the ethical and legal controversies surrounding embryonic stem cells, as we all know. Whats interesting in this one is that in hair follicles, stem cells are found in a small bulge right on the side of the hair follicle. These cells are used to help the follicle maintain itself.
"By luck," is how AntiCancer President Robert Hoffman describes finding the link between hair follicle stem cells and the brain. He shows off a hairless mouse that's at the center of the research. Under special light it glows bright green.
"What we wanted to do was image the stem cells in the brain," Hoffman explains. To do that they used a gene that makes jellyfish glow under fluorescent light. By linking the gene to a protein called "nestin" which is a protein in brain cells. Hoffman says the then put the mouse into an imager, "hoping to see the brain." Instead, he says, "all we could see was the green fluorescence of the skin. So we know that nestin must be expressed in the skin because the green fluorescent protein was expressed and they're linked. When they saw that the hair follicles were glowing brightly Hoffman says, "we knew at that point that there was a relationship between the stem cells of the hair follicle and the stem cells of the brain."...
Posted on March 29, 2005 02:51 PM