Researchers have figured out how to wake up dormant stem cells in the brain that have the ability to grow into new cells. It opens the door to developing new therapies for neurodevelopmental disorders like autism, learning disabilities, and cerebral palsy. Stem cells in the brain, called (NSCs), have the ability to proliferate, differentiate, and undergo a process of cell death.
Most of the NSCs in our brains exist in a dormant state, waiting for a signal that will reactivate them to undertake neurogenesis or the formation of new nerve cells. Evidence suggests that defective NSC reactivation may be associated with age-related cognitive decline and neurodevelopmental disorders, making identifying the mechanisms underlying the process important. Now, researchers from the Duke-NUS Medical School and the Mechanobiology Institute at the National University of Singapore (NUS) have gone further, discovering a method of activating dormant NSCs.
“Our findings add new knowledge to the limited body of research on mechanisms governing the reactivation of dormant neural stem cells,” said Professor Wang Hongyan, acting program director of the Neuroscience and Behavioral Disorders Research Program at Duke-NUS and the study’s corresponding author. For the present study, the researchers experimented on fruit flies ( ). In , the presence of dietary amino acids is sensed by the fat body, a functional equivalent of the human liver and adipose tissue, which triggers the production of insuli.