These papers demonstrate that human ESC cultures can be enriched for a single and specific progenitor cell type. Furthermore, the cells, which by all measures appear to be neuronal progenitor cells, behave this way in vitro and in vivo, and give rise to the major cell types of the central nervous system (CNS).
The two groups used different schemes, but their outcomes were remarkably similar. They first induced ESCs to become neuronal progenitor cells and identified them by certain morphological features. In the Zheung paper, neural, tube-like structures formed after the cultures were grown for a few weeks in FGF-2-containing media. Reubinoff simply starved the cultures, which caused ESCs to clump into little islands of differentiating cells. Each group isolated the neuronal progenitor cells away from the non-neuronal cells and treated them with various factors to send them down the neuronal cell pathway. In culture, the cells turned into the ...
