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Starvation halts brain development, but hungry cells jump-start growth when food becomes available

We all know that food is essential to healthy development of the brain and body, especially in the earliest stages of life. But exactly how early brain growth is affected by nutrition is not as well understood, especially on a cellular level.

One reason for this lack of understanding is simply the difficulty of studying animals before they are born. But in a study involving tadpoles, which develop entirely outside of a mother's womb, scientists at Scripps Research were able to unearth new findings about how brain cells respond to--and recover from--lack of nutrition.

"With tadpoles, we can look at early stages of brain development that are typically inaccessible to us," says cell biologist Caroline McKeown, PhD, a senior staff scientist in the neuroscience lab of Hollis Cline, PhD, and lead author of the study. "This study showed us, for the first time in a vertebrate species, the cell signaling pathways that are integral to nutrient-responsive cell division in neural stem cells. These findings may lead to new approaches for starting and stopping cell growth in the brain."

The research, which appears in the journal Development^[$], has multiple potential applications--including improved prenatal care in humans. McKeown said the findings also will contribute to on-going research in the lab on the role of neural stem cells in recovery from brain injury.

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