CRISPR helps brain stem cells regain youth in mice
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Brain stem cells (artificially coloured) give rise to neurons in young individuals, but that ability fades with advancing age. Credit: Riccardo Cassiani-Ingoni/Science Photo Library
Clues to keeping the brain’s regenerative cells youthful and energetic into old age have emerged by applying CRISPR gene editing to mice1.
Age impedes the ability of the brain’s stem cells to churn out new cells, but the study’s authors found that reducing the activity of a particular gene rejuvenated these stem cells, allowing them to proliferate and provide the brain with a supply of fresh neurons.
That gene regulates stem cells’ consumption of glucose, a sugar that is key to cellular metabolism. The results in mice fit well with an emerging picture from studies of postmortem human brains. These efforts, too, have found that age affects metabolism in the brain, says Maura Boldrini, a neuroscientist and psychiatrist at Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York City who was not involved in the latest research. “Probably their metabolism is less efficient than it used to be,” she says, adding that both the human results and the mouse study, published today in Nature, “open new avenues for potential therapeutics.”
The role of neural stem cells in the adult human brain has been controversial. Boldrini and others have published evidence that new neurons are made in the hippocampus, a region of the brain that is important for learning and memory, at least until the age of 792. Her team is now looking to see whether production of new neurons is altered in people with Alzheimer’s disease or psychiatric illnesses. But some researchers have reported that they could not find evidence that adults make new neurons in the hippocampus. “This controversy is still continuing,” Boldrini says.
