http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nn.3572.html
Last year Johns Hopkins researchers reported that brain cells known as parvalbumin-expressing interneurons instruct nearby stem cells not to divide by releasing a chemical signal called GABA.
In a new study, Professors Hongiun Song and Guo-li Ming wanted to find out how GABA from surrounding neurons affects the newborn neurons that stem cells produce. Many of these newborn neurons naturally die soon after their “birth,” Song says; if they do survive, the new cells migrate to a permanent home in the brain and forge connections called synapses with other cells.
To learn whether GABA is a factor in the newborn neurons’ survival and behavior, the research team tagged newborn neurons from mouse brains with a fluorescent protein and then watched their response to GABA.
“We didn’t expect these immature neurons to form synapses, so we were surprised to see that they had built synapses from surrounding interneurons and that GABA was getting to them that way,” Song says. In the earlier study, the team had found that GABA was getting to the synapse-less stem cells by a less direct route, drifting across the spaces between cells.
The team engineered the interneurons to be either stimulated or suppressed by light. When stimulated, the cells would indeed activate nearby newborn neurons, the researchers found. They next tried the light-stimulation trick in live mice, and found that when the specialized interneurons were stimulated and gave off
more GABA, the mice’s newborn neurons survived in greater numbers than otherwise. This was in contrast to the response of the stem cells, which go dormant when they detect GABA.
“This appears to be a very efficient system for tuning the brain’s response to its environment,” says Song. “When you have a high level of brain activity, you need more newborn neurons, and when you don’t have high activity, you don’t need newborn neurons, but you need to prepare yourself by keeping the stem cells active. It’s all regulated by the same signal.”
Song notes that parvalbumin-expressing interneurons have been found by others to behave abnormally in neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and mental illnesses such as schizophrenia.
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