Month: September 2022

HAN ET AL. "Forebrain engraftment by human glial progenitor cells enhances synaptic plasticity and learning in adult mice. Upon maturation, the recipient brains exhibited large numbers and high proportions of both human glial progenitors and astrocytes. Long term potentiation (LTP) was sharply enhanced in the human glial chimeric mice, as was their learning, as assessed by Barnes maze navigation, object-location memory, and both contextual and tone fear conditioning." https://lnkd.in/dQ9_J77 View in LinkedIn

NEW HYBRID MODEL. "These human glial-chimeric mice may present a fundamentally new experimental model by which human glial cells, and both normative and pathological species-specific aspects of human glial biology, may now be effectively studied in the live adult brain." https://lnkd.in/dQ9_J77 View in LinkedIn

HUMAN BRAIN MAKES SMARTER MICE. "Goldman first reported last year that mice with human glial cells are smarter. But the human cells his team injected then were mature so they simply integrated into the mouse brain tissue and stayed put." https://lnkd.in/d2TkhaZ View in LinkedIn

THE BRAIN IS IMMUNOLOGICALLY PRIVILEGED. The brain and testes do not reject foreign tissues. View in LinkedIn

NO GUARANTEES. "Human brain cell transplantation makes mice smart. The bold approach of grafting human brain cells into the mouse brain is enormously risky. The procedure could utterly fail. The grafted cells might not survive, or they might not insert themselves properly into brain circuitry, or they might change radically inside the strange environment of the mouse’s brain, or grow wildly and impair brain function, or perhaps even kill the mouse." https://lnkd.in/dqqJNPF View in LinkedIn

MOUSE BRAIN FULL OF HUMAN CELLS. "This time, he injected the precursors of these cells, glial progenitor cells, which were able to divide and multiply. That, he says, explains how they were able to take over the mouse brains so completely, stopping only when they reached the physical limits of the space." https://lnkd.in/d2TkhaZ View in LinkedIn

TURBO-CHARGED. "This does not provide the animals with additional capabilities that could in any way be ascribed or perceived as specifically human...Rather, the human cells are simply improving the efficiency of the mouse’s own neural networks. It’s still a mouse.” https://lnkd.in/d2TkhaZ View in LinkedIn

ARBITRARY LINE. "The team decided not to try putting human cells into monkeys. “We briefly considered it but decided not to because of all the potential ethical issues,” Goldman says. Enard agrees that it could be difficult to decide which animals to put human brain cells into. “If you make animals more human-like, where do you stop?” https://lnkd.in/d2TkhaZ View in LinkedIn

NUANCE. "It’s still a mouse brain, not a human brain,” says Steve Goldman of the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York. “But all the non-neuronal cells are human.” https://lnkd.in/d2TkhaZ View in LinkedIn

NOT TRIVIAL IMPACT. "Their memory was about four times better. “These were whopping effects,” says Goldman. “We can say they were statistically and significantly smarter than control mice.” https://lnkd.in/d2TkhaZ View in LinkedIn