Aug. 21 : German scientists have moved one step further towards the development of a method to replace damaged brain cells after injury or disease by finding that functional nerve cells can be generated from astroglia, a type of supportive cells in the brain, by means of special regulator.

Since the majority of cells in the human brain are star-shaped glia cells, and not nerve cells, they are called “astroglia”.

Dr. Magdalena Gotz, director of the Institute of Stemm Cell Research, GSF – National Research Center for Environment and Health, explains that “glia” means “glue”. The researcher says that these cells have so far been regarded merely as a kind of “putty” keeping the nerve cells together.

A research conducted several years ago had shown that glia cells function as stem cells during development, meaning thereby that they were able to differentiate into functional nerve cells.

This ability of glea cells, however, gets lost in later pahses of development, and that is why even after an injury to the adult brain, they are unable to generate any more nerve cells.

With a view to reversing this development, the researchers studied what molecular switches are essential for the creation of nerve cells from glia cells during development. These regulator proteins are introduced into glia cells from the postnatal brain, which indeed respond by switching on the expression of neuronal proteins.

The new study showed that single regulator proteins are quite sufficient to generate new functional nerve cells from glia cells.

The transition from glia-to-neuron could be followed live at a time-lapse microscope. It was shown that glia cells need some days for the reprogramming until they took the normal shape of a nerve cell.

“These new nerve cells then have also the typical electrical properties of normal nerve cells. We could show this by means of electrical recordings,” emphasises Dr. Benedikt Berninger.

“Our results are very encouraging, because the generation of correctly functional nerve cells from postnatal glia cells is an important step on the way to be able to replace functional nerve cells also after injuries in the brain,” underlines Magdalena Gotz. (ANI)