Neurodegenerative diseases are the hereditary and sporadic diseases which are characterized by progressive neuronal loss of the nervous system and are emerging as the leading cause of death, disabilities, and a socioeconomic burden due to an increase in life expectancy. There are many neurodegenerative diseases including Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s, disease, amyotrophic lateral...

Human neural progenitor cells provide a source for cell replacement therapy to treat neurodegenerative diseases. Therefore, there is great interest in mechanisms and tools to direct the fate of multipotent progenitor cells during their differentiation to increase the yield of a desired cell type. We tested small molecule inhibitors of glycogen synthase kinase-3 (GSK-3) for their functionality a...

introduction: the p19 line of embryonal carcinoma cells develops into neurons, astroglia and fibroblasts after aggregation and exposure to retinoic acid (ra). dehydroepiandroesteron (dhea) is a neurosteroid, can increase proliferation of human neural stem cell (nsc) and positively regulated the number of neurons produced. this study was initiated to assess the effect of dhea on neural progenito...

Neural progenitor cells in the ventricular zone of the developing mammalian cerebral cortex give rise to specialized cortical cell types via consecutive rounds of proliferation and differentiation, but the mechanisms by which progenitor cell self-renewal and differentiation are regulated during cortical development are not well understood. Here, we show that zinc-finger and homeodomain protein ...

Angiogenesis and neurogenesis are coupled processes. Using a coculture system, we tested the hypothesis that cerebral endothelial cells activated by ischemia enhance neural progenitor cell proliferation and differentiation, while neural progenitor cells isolated from the ischemic subventricular zone promote angiogenesis. Coculture of neural progenitor cells isolated from the subventricular zone...

The canonical Wnt/Wingless pathway is implicated in regulating cell proliferation and cell differentiation of neural stem/progenitor cells. Depending on the context, β-Catenin, a key mediator of the Wnt signaling pathway, may regulate either cell proliferation or differentiation. Here, we show that β-Catenin signaling regulates the differentiation of neural stem/progenitor cells in the presence...

Multipotent stem cells must generate various differentiated cell types in correct number and sequence during neural development. In the peripheral nervous system (PNS), this involves the formation of postmigratory progenitor cell types which maintain multipotency and are able to give rise to neural and non-neural cells in response to instructive growth factors. We propose that fate restrictions...

Much attention has been focused on neural cell transplantation because of its promising clinical applications. We have reported that embryonic stem (ES) cell derived neural stem/progenitor cell transplantation significantly improved motor functions in a hemiplegic mouse model. It is important to understand the molecular mechanisms governing neural regeneration of the damaged motor cortex after ...