Neural Stem Cells in the Adult Hippocampus

By J. Ray, D. Peterson. 2003

37 citations recorded by the source corpus.

It had long been held as dogma that no new neurons are added to the central nervous system after birth. The fixed neuronal population of the adult brain was understood to be necessary to maintain the functional stability of the adult brain and was also taken as an explanation for the lack of endogenous repair within the central nervous system following injury. However, there were early reports of cell proliferation in the adult brain (1–4), and these observations have been validated by the use of new, more powerful labeling techniques over the last decade (5). Nevertheless, under normal conditions, neurogenesis in the adult brain appears to be restricted to the subventricular zone and the hippocampal dentate gyrus. This review summarizes our current understanding regarding neurogenesis in the adult dentate gyrus, the extent to which primitive neural progenitor (stem) cells in the hippocampus can be manipulated in vitro and in vivo, and the implications of hippocampal neurogenesis for brain function and plasticity. Because of the importance of quantitative studies to our understanding of neurogenesis, some methodological and conceptual issues regarding histological quantitation are also addressed.

Subfields: Developmental Neuroscience, Genetics

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Citations in the corpus

Adult Neurogenesis in the Mammalian Brain: Significant Answers and Significant Questions (2011, background): “Under inflammatory conditions, reactivated microglia can have both beneficial and detrimental effects on different aspects of adult neurogenesis, depending on the balance between secreted molecules with pro-and anti-inflammatory action (reviewed by Ekdahl et al., 2009).”
Reduced Hippocampal Neurogenesis in Adult Transgenic Mice with Chronic Astrocytic Production of Interleukin-6 (2002, background): “Recently, neural stem cells have been proposed to be an astrocytic subtype, or at least to express the cytoskeleton filament protein GFAP (Doetsch et al., 1999; Seri et al., 2000), suggesting that neural stem cells themselves may express the IL-6 transgene at certain stages in their development.”