Source: Johns Hopkins Medicine
Date: June 29, 2011
Summary:
A Johns Hopkins team has discovered in young adult mice that a lone brain stem cell is capable not only of replacing itself and giving rise to specialized neurons and glia – important types of brain cells – but also of taking a wholly unexpected path: generating two new brain stem cells. A report on their study appears June 24 in Cell.
Although it was known that the brain has the capacity to generate both neurons, which send and receive signals, and the glial cells that surround them, it was unclear whether these various cell types came from a single source. In addition to demonstrating that a single radial glia-like (RGL) brain cell is able to generate two very different functional cell types, the Hopkins researchers, by following the fates of single cells over time, found that a single brain stem cell can even produce two stem cells like itself.
