Shades of Christine O’Donnell famously insisting that scientists were putting human brains into mice. I would like to be smarter, our researchers should apply this to humans.
http://health.usnews.com/health-news/news/articles/2013/03/07/human-brain-cells-used-to-make-mice-smarter
Implanting a type of human brain cell into newborn mice makes them
"smarter" as adults, scientists have found -- an achievement experts say
could aid in understanding and treating human brain diseases.
It sounds a bit like science fiction, but many studies have
looked at the effects of implanting rodent brains with human cells, said
Paul Sanberg, a professor of neuroscience at the University of South
Florida, in Tampa.
What's new here is that researchers were able
to implant mice with human brain cells called glial cells, see those
cells mature and act like human ones, and see the effects on the mice's
learning, said Sanberg, who was not involved in the research.
"That's exciting," he said. "The cells were still functioning like human cells, and they actually enhanced aspects of learning."
The
goal, though, is not to create brainy mice. The hope is to open up new
ways to understand human brain diseases and develop therapies for them,
said Dr. Steven Goldman, chairman of neurology at the University of
Rochester, in New York, and one of the researchers on the study.
Human
brains have different types of cells. Neurons are considered the
workhorses, sending electrical and chemical signals to each other. Glial
cells are seen as "support" cells that help transfer information among
neurons.
But the relative size of glial cells in the human brain
is bigger compared to non-primate animals. Humans also have more of
them, and greater diversity in them, Goldman said. It has been thought
that the evolution of glial cells may have been important to allowing
humans to become as smart as they are.
The new findings, which appear in the March 7 issue of the journal Cell Stem Cell, support that theory.
Sanberg
said there has already been a growing appreciation of the importance of
glial cells in degenerative brain diseases. Multiple sclerosis is the
"classic example of a glial disease," he said. But research suggests
impaired glial cells are involved in an array of disorders, including
Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's.
Being able to study the
function -- and dysfunction -- of human glial cells in rodent brains
could give researchers insight into many diseases, Sanberg and Goldman
said.
For the study, Goldman's team implanted human glial stem
cells into the brains of newborn mice. Stem cells are primitive cells
that give rise to mature, specialized cells.
The researchers found
that over time, the human glial stem cells matured and replaced the
mouse glial cells -- in essence, "taking over their brains," Goldman
said.
His team then used mouse-appropriate learning tests -- like
the classic escape-from-the-maze challenge -- to compare the animals'
functioning with that of mice with no human glial cells.
"We thought these mice should be smarter. They should be able to learn faster," Goldman said. "And that's what we found."
"It's
a remarkable finding," said James McGaugh, a research professor of
neurobiology and behavior at the University of California, Irvine.
The
results "elevate the role" of glial cells in human brain functioning,
said McGaugh, who was not involved in the research. As for human health
and disease, he added, "I don't see any immediate implications. But
clearly these are exciting findings that warrant further investigation."
Goldman
and his colleagues are already using this line of research to study
human disease. In a study published last month, they reported that they
have been able to take stem cells from the skin of patients with certain
brain diseases and use them to generate glial stem cells. The cells can
be implanted into mice to gain a better understanding of those
disorders, and to test new therapies, Goldman said.
Right now, the researchers are experimenting with cells taken from patients with schizophrenia and Huntington's disease.
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