Researchers at AntiCancer Inc have found a method of turning adult hair follicle stem cells into brains cells, a
ScienCentral News report has said. Using mice for experiments, scientists managed to coax their adult stem cells into becoming neurons, the brain’s nerve cells.
Stem cells differ from other cells since they have the capability to turn into specialized cells required by the body for maintenance and repair. Stem cells in hair follicles are located in a tiny protrusion on the side and are required for helping the follicle maintain itself. According to the researchers, the results of the experiment indicate a new ‘source of undifferentiated multi-potent stem cells’.
Calling the development sheer ‘luck’, AntiCancer president Robert Hoffman said that researchers were trying to ‘image the stem cells in the brain’ when the stumbled onto the discovery. They linked a gene that makes jellyfish glow under fluorescent light to a protein called nestin, which exists in brain cells. After that, a mouse was introduced into the imager to ‘see the brain’.
However, what researchers saw was ‘the green fluorescence of the skin’, Hoffman said adding that the team then knew that ‘nestin must be expressed in the skin because the green fluorescent protein was expressed and they’re linked’. The glowing hair follicles indicated that ‘there was a relationship between the stem cells of the hair follicle and the stem cells of the brain’. “We put them in culture and under conditions where brain stem cells would form neurons, the hair follicle stem cells also formed neurons. We also injected some of these stem cells into the skin of mice and they formed neurons there, too,” Hoffman said.
Now, researchers have the task of isolating the hair follicle stem cells and growing these stem cells in the laboratory. If successful, the development could eliminate the need for using embryos as sources of stem cells. Also, it could open new avenues for research into tissue and organ transplants as well into neurological conditions. The findings have been published in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
