FLICKR, NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF CHILD HEALTH AND HUMAN DEVELOPMENTTransplanted embryonic neurons can properly connect into the developed visual cortex of adult mice and improve the animals’ sensitivities to visual cues over time, scientists reported today (October 26) in Nature. By demonstrating that added neurons can become fully functional in circuits that normally do not rewire in adulthood, the team’s results suggest that the brain may be more plastic than previously thought.
“For the first time, the authors show that we can visualize and analyze in vivo maturation and integration of grafted neurons at the level of individual cells,” said neuroscientist Afsaneh Gaillard of the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research (INSERM) and the University of Poitiers, France, who was not involved in the research.
Magdalena Götz of Ludwig-Maximilians University and the Institute of Stem Cell Research at the Helmholtz Center in Munich, Germany, initially wanted to study how well new mouse neurons—created through direct neuronal reprogramming, a technique her group pioneered to turn glial cells into neurons—could integrate into adult brain circuits. Because no one had previously examined the function and connectivity of any transplanted neurons on a brain-wide scale, she and her colleagues ...
