Spinal cord injury (SCI) is the leading cause of paralysis, disability and even death in severe cases, and neural stem cells (NSCs) transplant has been employed for repairing SCI. Ferulic acid (FA) is able to promote neurogenesis in various stem cell therapies. We aimed to investigate the effect of FA on NSC transplant therapy, and the underlying mechanism, in improving functional recovery in S...

Cyclin-dependent kinase 5 (Cdk5) plays a key role in the development of the mammalian nervous system; it phosphorylates a number of targeted proteins involved in neuronal migration during development to synaptic activity in the mature nervous system. Its role in the initial stages of neuronal commitment and differentiation of neural stem cells (NSCs), however, is poorly understood. In this stud...

The electrical activity of magnocellular neurosecretory cells (NSCs) is correlated with the release rates of neurohypophysial hormones. NSCs may control their secretory activity in a cooperative manner by changing their electrical activity in response to changes in the internal milieu. In the present study, we applied confocal Ca imaging to a sagittally hemisected rainbow trout brain to simulta...

Embryonic stem cell (ESC) identity is orchestrated by co-operativity between the transcription factors (TFs) Sox2 and the class V POU-TF Oct4 at composite Sox/Oct motifs. Neural stem cells (NSCs) lack Oct4 but express Sox2 and class III POU-TFs Oct6, Brn1 and Brn2. This raises the question of how Sox2 interacts with POU-TFs to transcriptionally specify ESCs versus NSCs. Here, we show that Oct4 ...

During central nervous system (CNS) development, proliferation and differentiation of neural stem cells (NSCs) have to be regulated in a spatio-temporal fashion. Here, we report different branches of the transforming growth factor β (TGFβ) signaling pathway to be required for the brain area-specific control of NSCs. In the midbrain, canonical TGFβ signaling via Smad4 regulates the balance betwe...

This study was supported by EU FP7 grant GlowBrain (REGPOT–2012–CT2012– 316120) to S.G. and by a University of Trento Startup Grant and the Cassa di Risparmio di Trento e Rovereto Grant n. 2011.0251 to S.C. Since the central nervous system shows very little capability for self-repair following ischemic injury, regenerative medicine approaches are increasingly interested in the use of neural ste...

NSCs are responsible for the generation of CNS cell types derived from the neural tube. Published data resulting from experiments studying the differentiation of NSCs in vitro or in vivo have confirmed their spontaneous tripotency, i.e. their ability to generate cells of the neuronal, astroglial and oligodendroglial lineages. The relationship between NSCs generated in vitro and ependymal cells ...

DNA methylation is known to regulate cell differentiation and neuronal function in vivo. Here we examined whether deficiency of a de novo DNA methyltransferase, Dnmt3a, affects in vitro differentiation of mouse embryonic stem cells (mESCs) to neuronal and glial cell lineages. Early-passage neural stem cells (NSCs) derived from Dnmt3a-deficient ESCs exhibited a moderate phenotype in precocious g...

BACKGROUND Maternal diabetes alters gene expression leading to neural tube defects (NTDs) in the developing brain. The mechanistic pathways that deregulate the gene expression remain unknown. It is hypothesized that exposure of neural stem cells (NSCs) to high glucose/hyperglycemia results in activation of epigenetic mechanisms which alter gene expression and cell fate during brain development....

Cord blood-derived neural stem cells (NSCs) are proposed as an alternative cell source to repair brain damage upon transplantation. However, there is a lack of data showing how these cells are driven to generate desired phenotypes by recipient nervous tissue. Previous research indicates that local environment provides signals driving the fate of stem cells. To investigate the impact of these lo...