Stepping Towards Neuroregeneration
The prize awaiting us when the scientific community attains even a modest control over the mechanisms and actions of cells is great indeed: regeneration and replacement of injured and age-damaged tissue on demand. From ScienceDaily, a look at one small step on the way: researcher have "achieved an additional step for the potential replacement of damaged brain cells after injury or disease: functional nerve cells can be generated from astroglia, a type of supportive cells in the brain by means of special regulator proteins. ... these glia cells function as stem cells during development. This means that they are able to differentiate into functional nerve cells. However, this ability gets lost in later phases of development ... In order to be able to reverse this development, the team studied what molecular switches are essential for the creation of nerve cells from glial cells during development. These regulator proteins are introduced into glial cells from the postnatal brain, which indeed respond by switching on the expression of neuronal proteins. ... single regulator proteins are quite sufficient to generate new functional nerve cells from glia cells."
Link: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/08/070820115430.htm