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posted by martyb on Saturday April 11 2015, @12:52AM   Printer-friendly
from the BRAINS! dept.

Researchers at Penn State University have developed a technique using retroviral expression of DNA transcription factor NEUROD1 to transform astrocytes into glutamatergic neurons and NG2 cells into GABAergic neurons. Astrocytes and NG2 are glial cells, a kind of support cell for neurons performing a wide variety of functions. Glutramate is an excitatory neurotransmitter and a precursur to GABA, GABA is an inhibitory neurotransmitter. According to this page "The majority of excitatory neurons in the CNS are glutamatergic and over half of all brain synapses release glutamate."

This procedure only involves converting dysfunctional reactive glial cells associated with nerve injury and neurodegenerative disorders.

A crowd funding appeal was recently launched to speed up research in order to begin human trials more quickly.

The abstract of the paper:

Loss of neurons after brain injury and in neurodegenerative disease is often accompanied by reactive gliosis and scarring, which are difficult to reverse with existing treatment approaches. Here, we show that reactive glial cells in the cortex of stab-injured or Alzheimer’s disease (AD) model mice can be directly reprogrammed into functional neurons in vivo using retroviral expression of a single neural transcription factor, NeuroD1. Following expression of NeuroD1, astrocytes were reprogrammed into glutamatergic neurons, while NG2 cells were reprogrammed into glutamatergic and GABAergic neurons. Cortical slice recordings revealed both spontaneous and evoked synaptic responses in NeuroD1-converted neurons, suggesting that they integrated into local neural circuits. NeuroD1 expression was also able to reprogram cultured human cortical astrocytes into functional neurons. Our studies therefore suggest that direct reprogramming of reactive glial cells into functional neurons in vivo could provide an alternative approach for repair of injured or diseased brain.

There's a youtube of Gong Chen, the team director talking about the discovery.

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 11 2015, @02:50PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 11 2015, @02:50PM (#168957)

    I love the idea of Open Science. Unfortunately the research labs, universities, big pharma, etc will always be after a piece of the action (especially if they're not incurring the initial R&D expenses). Open Science ... to the highest bidder.