Happiness in a test tube
Bioengineers have grown "neurons of happiness" in a Petri dish
Anna Govorova, Infox.ru
Bioengineers led by specialists from the State University of New York at Buffalo for the first time managed to turn human fibroblasts (connective tissue cells) into neurons that produce serotonin, Infox reports.
Serotonin is one of the most important neurotransmitters that plays an important role in mood regulation. A lack of serotonin is associated with many mental disorders – depression, anxiety, eating disorders, autism.
As the authors say, neurons grown in this way can become an excellent model for studying these diseases, they can be used both for the development of new drugs and for testing existing ones.
In their research, the scientists used the method of direct reprogramming, when cells of one type turn into another without the stem cell stage.
Currently, in cellular medicine, either embryonic cells or cells of an adult organism are mainly used, to which pluripotency is restored. These are so-called induced pluripotent stem cells, which can turn into cells of almost any organs and tissues. For the first time such cells were obtained by Professor Yamanaka from Kyoto University in 2006, for which he received the Nobel Prize in 2012.
But there is a serious danger lurking in stem cells – there is always a risk that they will not cope with pluripotency and develop into a cancerous tumor. This is one of the reasons that hinders the use of this technology in clinical practice.
In the last few years, an alternative to this method has appeared. Scientists have learned to directly reprogram adult cells from one type to another, bypassing the "dangerous" stem stage.
In their current study, the authors first found out which transcription factors trigger the genes that are needed for the formation of serotonergic neurons. It turned out that this requires the work of four transcription factors – Ascl1, Foxa2, Lmx1b and FEV. After treating fibroblasts with them, bioengineers obtained neurons that secrete serotonin (in the picture from the press release of the University at Buffalo Scientists grow human serotonin neurons in petri dish, they are highlighted in green - VM).
"For the first time, we were able to obtain such neurons from fibroblasts using direct reprogramming. And our experiment showed that these cells can actually produce serotonin and capture it," says lead author of the study, Professor Feng Jian.
Now Professor Jing's team is working to obtain, also by direct reprogramming, neurons that produce serotonin, but already from human skin cells. This procedure, Jing adds, should be clinically simpler than working with fibroblasts.
An article on the transformation of fibroblasts into serotonergic neurons is published in the latest issue of the journal Molecular Psychiatry (Xu et al., Direct conversion of human fibroblasts to induced serotonergic neurons, in open access).
It is worth adding that regenerative medicine has advanced very far, and bioengineers have already learned how to obtain different types of neurons from both different types of stem cells and from other cells using direct reprogramming.
For example, bioengineers have recently managed to create dopaminergic neurons from human skin cells. Methods of growing such neurons are also known from induced pluripotent stem cells of animals, and from human embryonic stem cells. These studies are important because it is the neurons synthesizing dopamine that are affected by a severe and currently incurable neurodegenerative disease – Parkinson's disease.
And here is an example of another direction of such experiments: recently, bioengineers from McMaster University (Canada) under the guidance of a well-known specialist Dr. Mikie Bhatia managed to obtain neurons from adult blood cells for the first time.
And bioengineers from Columbia University (USA) have grown neurons from human skin cells that are responsible for controlling appetite.
However, while all these studies are at the experimental stage, and unfortunately, it is still far from the application of these methods in clinical practice for the treatment of various diseases.
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07.08.2015