Multiple sclerosis (MS) is an autoimmune disease which affects myelin in the central nervous system (CNS) and leads to serious disability. Currently available treatments for MS mainly suppress the immune system. Regenerative medicine-based approaches attempt to increase myelin repair by targeting endogenous progenitors or transplanting stem cells or their derivatives. Fingolimod exerts anti-inf...

Presenilin-1 (PS1) is the catalytic core of the aspartyl protease γ-secretase. Previous genetic studies using germ-line deletion of PS1 and conditional knock-out mice demonstrated that PS1 plays an essential role in neuronal differentiation during neural development, but it remained unclear whether PS1 plays a similar role in neurogenesis in the adult brain. Here we show that neural progenitor ...

Human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) are able to proliferate in vitro indefinitely without losing their ability to differentiate into multiple cell types upon exposure to appropriate signals. Particularly, the ability of hESCs to differentiate into neuronal subtypes is fundamental to develop cell-based therapies for several neurodegenerative disorders, such as Alzheimer's disease, Huntington's di...

Neural stem and progenitor cells are located in the subependyma of the adult forebrain. An increase in adult subependymal cell proliferation is reported after various kinds of brain injury. We demonstrate an expansion of neural precursor cells in the postnatal subependyma in a murine genetic disease model of Huntington's disease (HD), the R6/2 mouse. We used the in vitro neurosphere assay as an...

Neural stem/progenitor cells capable of differentiating into the neurons and glial cells that populate the mammalian central nervous system (CNS) persist in specific neural stem cell niches that regulate stem cell proliferation, survival and differentiation. There is growing evidence that the extracellular matrix within neural stem cell niches is required for neural stem cell maintenance. Here,...

fluoxetine is a common antidepressant which selectively inhibits serotonin reuptake at synaptic level. some research findings have proposed the effect this drug on neurogenesis, neuronal survival as well as proliferation of the neural progenitor cells. endometrium is a part of uterus which harbors mesenchymal stem cells. this source of stem cells can be differentiated into neural cells which ma...

We investigated the hypothesis that endothelial cells activated by erythropoietin (EPO) promote the migration of neuroblasts. This hypothesis is based on observations in vivo that treatment of focal cerebral ischemia with EPO enhances the migration of neuroblasts to the ischemic boundary, a site containing activated endothelial cells and angiogenic microvasculature. To model the microenvironmen...

Predicting neuronal networks from calcium fluorescence data is extremely difficult due to the nature of the data collection. Current methods to overcome this difficulty, while powerful, are somewhat arbitrary, presenting new difficulties in later analysis. Specifically, current ad-hoc methods often make arbitrary distinctions between connected and unconnected neurons. In this project, I attempt...

During mammalian cerebral cortex development, the G1-phase of the cell cycle is known to lengthen, but it has been unclear which neural stem and progenitor cells are affected. In this paper, we develop a novel approach to determine cell-cycle parameters in specific classes of neural stem and progenitor cells, identified by molecular markers rather than location. We found that G1 lengthening was...

UNLABELLED An increasing body of evidence indicates that astrocytes contribute to the governance and fine tuning of stem and progenitor cell production during brain development. The effect of astrocyte function in cell production in neurodevelopmental disorders is unknown. We used the Neural Colony Forming Cell assay to determine the effect of astrocyte conditioned media (ACM) on the generation...