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    Home > Biochemistry News > Biotechnology News > When nerve cells are "amazingly" regenerating

    When nerve cells are "amazingly" regenerating

    • Last Update: 2021-10-22
    • Source: Internet
    • Author: User
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    Once damaged or dead, nerve cells are difficult to regenerate, which brings great difficulties to the treatment of nerve damage and neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's disease
    .


    In recent years, some new studies have shown that in some cases, increasing or decreasing the expression of specific genes can change the fate of cells, allowing the abundant glial cells in the animal brain to "transform in situ", in terms of morphology, connection, and function.


    However, the top academic journal "Cell" recently published a research paper.
    The research team led by Professor Chunli Zhang from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center (UT Southwestern) pointed out that it is necessary to confirm whether the regenerated nerve cells are derived from astrocytes.
    An important part of the transdifferentiation of humans is indispensable, that is, strict lineage tracing in the body
    .


    Based on this test method, the research team questioned some of the previously discovered nerve regeneration research results


    Cell lineage tracking refers to marking the offspring of specific cells in an organism.
    It is a basic method of developmental biology and the core of the field of stem cell biology
    .

    After a series of analysis of more than ten experiments, the researchers confirmed from the existing pedigree tracing analysis methods which test methods have the most robust and reliable results, and which test methods are relatively unable to provide accurate results
    .

    A very amazing claim requires very amazing evidence
    .


    Therefore, this research team used cell lineage tracing to repeat and test the claims of "astrocytes transdifferentiation into neurons in situ" reported in previous experiments


    According to previous reports, using AAV virus as a vector to overexpress NEUROD1 in the brain of mice or effectively knock down PTBP1, astrocytes will transdifferentiate into neurons


    However, based on the results of lineage tracing analysis, the research team believes that the newborn neurons in the mouse brain cannot be traced back to the resting or activated astrocytes, which means that these regenerated neurons are not derived from astrocytes.


    On the contrary, the researchers used retrograde labeling to find that neurons labeled with reporter genes originated from endogenous neurons that existed in the mouse brain


    ▲Schematic diagram of this research (picture source: reference [1])

    The research team called in the paper that these results emphasize that lineage tracing methods are essential for the study of nerve cell regeneration.


    Reference materials:

    [1] Lei-Lei Wang et al.


    [2] Strict lineage tracing crucial to nerve cell regeneration research, study says.


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