Radial glial cells, ubiquitous throughout the developing CNS, guide radially migrating neurons and are the precursors of astrocytes. Recent evidence indicates that radial glial cells also generate neurons in the developing cerebral cortex. Here we invest
Nervous systems of bilaterian animals generally consist of two cell types: neurons and glial cells. Despite accumulating data about the many important functions glial cells serve in bilaterian nervous systems, the evolutionary origin of this abundant cel
The Glial cells missing transcription factor is necessary and sufficient to induce glial-cell fates in the Drosophila embryonic nervous system. A study by Chotard et al. in this issue of Neuron reveals that this "master regulator" of glial cell fate specification is also required (gasp!) to ...
In Vitro Studies of Glial Cells In the 1980s glial cell culture techniques were developed in which the cell-specific markers enabled cell identity to be confirmed. Such in vitro methods have been coupled with imaging techniques to record changes in intracellular Ca2+ and other ions and patch cla...
Blood flow in the brain is regulated by neurons and astrocytes. Knowledge of how these cells control blood flow is crucial for understanding how neural computation is powered, for interpreting functional imaging scans of brains, and for developing treatm
Although extensive research has been performed to control differentiation of neural stem cells – still, the response of those cells to diverse cell culture conditions often appears to be random and difficult to predict. To this end, we strived to obtain stabilized protocol of NHA cells differentiat...
This is accompanied by changes in their capacity to make neurons versus glia and in their response to the mitogen EGF. Hence, multipotent stem cells alter their properties over time and undergo distinct phases of development that play a key role in scheduling production of diverse CNS cells....
A novel neurotrophic factor referred to as glial cell line-derived neurotrophic factor (GDNF) has been identified and isolated from serum free growth conditioned medium of B49 glioblastoma cells. Rat and human genes encoding GDNF have been cloned and sequenced. A gene encoding GDNF has been subcl...
Hypotheses regarding the role of adult-born neuron synaptic integration in hippocampal circuit function are framed by robust estimations of adult-born versus pre/perinatally-born neuron number. In contrast, the non-neurogenic functions of adult neural stem cells and their immediate progeny, such as ...
Similar to peripheral immune/inflammatory cells, neuroglial cells appear to rely on calcineurin (CN) signaling pathways to regulate cytokine production and cellular activation. Several studies suggest that harmful immune/inflammatory responses may be the most impactful consequence of aberrant CN activity ...