#neural stem cells

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Niche Influencer

A complex of evolutionarily conserved molecules establishes the niches in which neural stem cells reside and become neurons and impact adult behaviour in the fruit fly

Read the published research paper here

Image from work by Agata Banach-Latapy and colleagues

Institut Pasteur, Université Paris Cité, CNRS UMR3738, Structure and Signals in the Neurogenic Niche, Paris, France

Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Published in PLOS Biology, November 2023

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Discovery of the cell fate switch from neurons to astrocytes in the developing brain

The FGF signaling pathway is an important extracellular regulator in the fate of neural stem cells switching from neurons to astrocytes in the cerebral cortex.

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Refining Replicas

When making replicas, details matter. That's true for organoids too – lab-grown replicas of human organs. To replicate brain tissue, brain organoids need neural stem cells (NSCs) to persist so they can produce the brain's tens of different cell types. This, however, has proven tricky to achieve. Researchers now present brain organoids that do contain long-lasting NSCs by suppressing the activity of two proteins involved in development, SMAD and Wnt, for a short period of time, early in organoid generation. Suppressing both SMAD and Wnt (pictured, right) produced greater levels of long-lasting NSCs (red) compared with suppressing SMAD alone (left). This method also produced defined regions containing outer radial glia – cells found in a particular layer of the brain – suggesting the production of organised brain tissue. These organoids, therefore, provide a more accurate way to model brain tissue and investigate brain disease.

Written by Lux Fatimathas

Image from work by Daniel Rosebrock and Sneha Arora, and colleagues

Department of Genome Regulation, Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics, Berlin, Germany

Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Published in Nature Cell Biology, June 2022

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Tails with Lessons

Somewhere between axolotls able to regenerate their lost limbs, and humans who… can’t, lizards sit at an interesting place on the evolutionary tree. Like axolotls they can regenerate their tails – but not quite as completely. Now scientists use stem cells to give this regenerated gecko’s tail (pictured on the left) tissue ‘patterning’ matching its lost appendage. And key to achieving this is allowing the stem cells’ potential to thrive in the adult lizard. The team implant neural stem cells (NSCs) from an embryo into an adult’s tail stump, after editing genes to make the cells ignore pattern-blocking signals in the adult tissue. The gecko’s new tail grows from a ball-like blastema (right) with patterns of muscle (highlighted in white), cartilage (red) and dividing cells (green) around an unseen skeleton and nervous system. Researchers hope similar approaches may help human stem cells to treat hard-to-heal injuries, sharing lessons down the evolutionary tree.

Written by John Ankers

Images from the Lozito Lab, USC

Department of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Research published Nature Communications, October 2021

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Old Memories

As we get older, many of us will find our memory starts to struggle a little. One reason for this is that our neural stem cells – cells in our brain that produce new brain cells throughout life – slow down their production. A new study has shown that this diminishing is precipitated by a reduction in a particular protein, lamin B1 (red in the mouse hippocampus pictured). Without it, as stem cells (blue) divide into two daughter cells, the usual process that carefully allocates any harmful lingering proteins is hampered. The resulting cells are less well equipped to produce new neurons, meaning we find new memories hard to form and old ones hard to grasp. Promisingly, providing extra lamin B1 restored stem cell division and new neuron production ramped up. If the approach could be applied in humans, it might delay many aspects of ageing, and protect our valuable memories.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Image from work by Muhammad Khadeesh bin Imtiaz and colleagues

Laboratory of Neural Plasticity, Faculties of Medicine and Science, Brain Research Institute, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

Image copyright held by the original authors

Research published in Cell Stem Cell, February 2021

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Spine in Time

Scientists often need to put themselves in the right place at the right time. The secret to how this axolotl’s spinal cord (shown in cross section) regenerates may be hidden in the first few hours after injury. Scientists know that, days later, nearby neural stem cells (highlighted in red and green with blue nuclei) are dividing three times faster than normal – but how? Researchers used mathematical modelling of the cell cycle to make a prediction: while cells in healthy spines divide out of synch with each other, injury calls a portion of these cells to the same 'stage' of the cell cycle, synchronising division. Peeking at cells at different windows of time after amputation supports this theory. Such combinations of predictive modelling and reinforcing experiments allow researchers to piece together dramatic events that – at least for the moment – remain a little mysterious.

Written by John Ankers

Image from work by Emanuel Cura Costa and Leo Otsuki, and colleagues

Center for Information Services and High Performance Computing, Technische Universität Dresden, Dresden, Germany

Image copyright held by the original authors

Research published in eLife, May 2021

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Stem Cell Fates

Neural stem cells in the developing brain don't divide equally. One daughter cell is destined to become a neuron, the other remains a stem cell producing more daughters. To understand how this polarity of cell fate occurs, scientists turn to model organisms such as the fruit fly, a neural stem cell of which is shown here– the large cell on the right – with its progeny blebbing out to the left. The researchers who took this photo, which is falsely coloured, used a super-resolution form of imaging called spinning-disk confocal microscopy, ideal for observing the details of living cells. They studied the dynamics of cell membrane factors (orange) showing that their distribution changes over the course of the cell cycle and reflects the establishment of polarity prior to division. Understanding how such polarity and neural fates are established may one day inform efforts to regenerate neurons destroyed by injury or disease.

Written by Ruth Williams

Image from work by Bryce LaFoya and Kenneth E. Prehoda

Institute of Molecular Biology, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, USA

Image copyright held by the original authors

Research published in Cell Reports, May 2021

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Spine-saving Spheres

Cut your hair or scratch your skin and they regrow. Not so with nerves within your spine – they don't regrow after injury. However, neural stem cells have shown promise for treating spinal injuries in mouse models. Translating these results to humans is more challenging and it's thought that the material in which neural stem cells are grafted is important. Collagen scaffolds are already used to encourage regrowth of other tissues in humans and so researchers grafted neural stem cells into mice following spinal injury using a similar approach. They tested collagen scaffolds akin to those used to help regrow skin and nerves outside the spine. Both supported neural stem cells growing in number to form clusters called neurospheres, as captured using scanning electron microscopy (pictured). The neurospheres went on to form functioning nerves that restored movement in treated mice to levels equivalent to normal mice, bringing hope for treating human spinal injuries.

Written by Lux Fatimathas

Image from work by Alexandra Kourgiantaki, Dimitrios S. Tzeranis and Kanelina Karali, and colleagues

Department of Pharmacology, School of Medicine, University of Crete, Heraklion, Greece

Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Published in npj Regenerative Medicine, June 2020

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