COURTESY OF HONGKUI DENGOver the past several years, scientists have been in hot pursuit of finding an efficient way to directly transform skin cells to brain cells—skipping an intermediate pluripotent step. Genetic approaches have worked to varying degrees. Now, two independent groups report having made the process even simpler, by soaking fibroblasts in combinations of small molecules, thereby obviating the need to tinker with gene expression to turn the cells into neurons.
“These two studies really show that if you just manipulate intercellular signaling pathways, cell fate can be changed,” said Chun-Li Zhang, a neuroscientist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, who did not participate in the research.
“The inducing efficiency of our approach is comparable with using transgenic reprogramming factors,” HongKui Deng, a cell biologist at Peking University who led one of the teams, told The Scientist in an email. “I hope in the future the chemical approaches would be more robust in inducing functional mature neurons.”
The first direct conversion of a somatic cell to a neuron, by means of inducing particular genes, was reported in 2010 by Marius Wernig’s group at Stanford University. Since then, numerous studies have shown it to be ...
