Stem cells are under intense investigation as potential therapeutics for central nervous system (CNS) injury and disease. However, several reports have suggested that stem cells grown as neurospheres and transplanted into an injured environment preferentially differentiate into astrocytes, contributing to glial scar. Further, the relationship between functional recovery and cell transplantation...

Astrocytes are commonly involved in negative responses through their hyperreactivity and glial scar formation in excitotoxic and/or mechanical injuries. But, astrocytes are also specialized glial cells of the nervous system that perform multiple homeostatic functions for the survival and maintenance of the neurovascular unit. Astrocytes have neuroprotective, angiogenic, immunomodulatory, neurog...

Because there currently is no treatment for spinal cord injury, most patients are living with long-standing injuries. Therefore, strategies aimed at promoting restoration of function to the chronically injured spinal cord have high therapeutic value. For successful regeneration, long-injured axons must overcome their poor intrinsic growth potential as well as the inhibitory environment of the g...

Reactive astrocytes are a pathological hallmark of many CNS injuries and neurodegenerations. They are characterized by hypertrophy of the soma and processes and an increase in the expression of glial fibrillary acidic protein. Because the cells obscure each other in immunostaining, little is known about the behavior of a single reactive astrocyte, nor how single astrocytes combine to form the g...

A novel in vitro model of glial scarring was developed by adapting a primary cell-based system previously used for studying neuroinflammatory processes in neurodegenerative disease. Midbrains from embryonic day 14 Fischer 344 rats were mechanically dissociated and grown on poly-D-lysine coated 24 well plates to a confluent layer of neurons, astrocytes, and microglia. The culture was injured wit...

Nerve fiber innervation of the scar following myocardial damage may have occurred either via the growth of pre-existing fibers and/or the mobilization of neural stem cells. The present study examined whether neural stem cells were recruited to the infarct region of the rat heart following coronary artery ligation. The neural stem cell marker nestin was detected in the infarct region of 1-week p...

UNLABELLED Spinal cord injuries (SCIs) result in devastating lifelong disability for patients and their families. The initial mechanical trauma is followed by a damaging secondary injury cascade involving proapoptotic signaling, ischemia, and inflammatory cell infiltration. Ongoing cellular necrosis releases ATP, DNA, glutamate, and free radicals to create a cytotoxic postinjury milieu. Long-te...

The prevailing view of the astrocytic response to injury is that reactive astrocytes impede the regenerative process by forming scar tissue. As the levels of many cytokines dramatically increase following CNS insult and as this increase in cytokine expression precedes the production of the glial scar, a longstanding view has been that cytokines diminish neuronal survival and regeneration by sti...

Although many areas of the brain lose their regenerative capacity with age, stem cell niches have been identified in both the subventricular zone (SVZ) along the lateral walls of the lateral ventricles and the subgranular zone (SGZ) of the dentate gyrus (Gage, 2000; Alvarez-Buylla et al., 2001; Alvarez-Buylla and Lim, 2004). The SVZ niche utilizes many mechanisms to determine the migration patt...