Researchers at the Cajal Institute of CSIC discovered that the brain of born mice has stem cells capable of generating neurons and glial cells after birth. The finding, published in the journal Stem Cell Reports, changes the current approach on the generation of new cells in the adult brain, which had always focused on the neuronal lineage and less on the glial (astrocytes and oligodendrocytes), which make up at least half of the cells present in the adult brain.
Previous work had shown the existence of multipotential progenitor cells that gave rise to different neural types in vitro. However, so far, a clonal relationship between cells of different types, such as neurons and glial cells, from neonatal progenitors in the telencephalon in vivo had not been described.
“This study opens new lines to better understand the relationship between sister cells of different types in the central nervous system, which could help in the development of new therapeutic strategies, such as cellular reprogramming. The behavior of these progenitor (cells) that last in the postnatal brain can facilitate the compression of processes such as neurodegeneration and, of course, of the new generation of neurons in adults, which will have to be confirmed in the human adult brain,” explains Laura López Mascaraque, one of the authors.
New method of clonal analysis
This work has been possible thanks to a new method of clonal analysis called UbC-StarTrack , developed by the team. This technique allows each stem cell to be labeled with a specific and different barcode, by expressing fluorescent proteins of different colors. In this way, a stable and unique color code is created in a cell that identifies its entire offspring.
“This is how we have been able to study the distribution and identity of cells that come from the same progenitor cell (mother) in neonatal brains. UbC-StarTrack has revealed that a postnatal parent is still capable of generating sister cells that include cell types of various lineages such as neurons, astrocytes and oligodendrocytes,” concludes the researcher.
Source: SINC
