We need this for dendrite outgrowth. What is your doctor doing to followup with the researchers to create a stroke protocol or start human research on this? If nothing is being done you will need to call the hospital president and ask that that incompetent doctor is fired. We have to clear out the dead wood somehow or we will always be stuck at 10% full recovery. I will not be polite in the face of proven incompetency.
http://neurosciencenews.com/dendrites-genetics-axons-4131/
Univ. of Iowa biologists show how brain cells get the message to develop a signaling network.
When you think of a neuron, imagine a tree.
A healthy brain cell indeed looks like a tree with a full canopy.
There’s a trunk, which is the cell’s nucleus; there’s a root system,
embodied in a single axon; and there are the branches, called dendrites.
Neurons in your brain pass signals from one to another like they’re
playing an elaborate, lightning-quick game of telephone, using axons as
the transmitters and dendrites as the receivers. Those signals originate
in the brain and are passed throughout the body, culminating in simple
actions, such as wiggling a toe, to more complex instructions, such as
following through on a thought.
Just as you can judge a healthy tree by its canopy, so too can
scientists judge a healthy neuron by its dendritic branches. But it had
been unclear what causes dendrites to grow, and where those instructions
to grow come from.
Biologists at the University of Iowa have determined a group of genes
associated with neurons help regulate dendrites’ growth. But there’s a
catch: These genes, called gamma-protocadherins, must be an exact match
for each neuron for the cells to correctly grow dendrites.
The findings may offer new insight into what causes aggressive or
stunted dendrite growth in neurons, which could help explain the
biological reasons for some mental-health diseases, as well as help
researchers better understand brain development in babies born
prematurely.
“Disrupted dendrite arborization is seen in the brains of people with
autism and schizophrenia, so processes like the one we have uncovered
here may have relevance to human disorders,” says Joshua Weiner, a
molecular biologist at the UI and corresponding author on the paper,
published online this month in the journal Cell Reports.
Gamma-protocadherins are called “adhesion molecules” because they
stick out from a cell’s membrane to bind and hold cells together. The
researchers learned about their role by giving a developing brain cell
in a mouse the same gamma-protocadherin as in surrounding cells. When
they did, the cells grew longer, more complex dendrites. But when the
researchers outfitted a mouse neuron with a different
gamma-protocadherin than the cells around it, dendritic growth was
stunted.
The human brain is filled with neurons. Scientists think adults have
100 billion brain cells, each in close proximity to others and all
seeking to make contact through their axons and dendrites. The denser a
neuron’s dendritic network, the more apt a cell is to be in touch with
another and aid in passing signals.
Gamma-protocadherins act like molecular Velcro, binding neurons
together and instructing them to grow their dendrites. Weiner and his
team figured out their role when they observed paltry dendritic growth
in mouse brain cells where the gamma-protocadherins had been silenced.
The researchers went further in the new study. Using mice, they
expressed the same type of gamma-protocadherin (labeled either as A1 or
C3) in neurons in the cerebral cortex, a region of the brain that
processes language and information. After five weeks, the neurons had
sizeable dendritic networks, indicative of a healthy, normally
functioning brain. Likewise, when they turned on a gamma-protocadherin
gene in a neuron different from the gamma-protocadherin gene with the
cells surrounding it, the mice had limited dendrite growth after the
same time period.
That’s important because human neurons carry up to six
gamma-protocadherins, meaning there are many combinations potentially in
play. Yet, it seems the “grow your dendrite” signal only happens when
neurons carrying the the same gamma-protocadherin gene pair up.
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