Forebrain engraftment by human glial progenitor cells enhances synaptic plasticity and learning in adult mice

By Xiaoning Han, M. Chen, Fushun Wang, M. Windrem, Su Wang, Steven Shanz, Qiwu Xu, N. Oberheim, L. Bekar, S. Betstadt and 4 more. Cell Stem Cell, 2013

617 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Human astrocytes are larger and more complex than those of infraprimate mammals, suggesting that their role in neural processing has expanded with evolution. To assess the cell-autonomous and species-selective properties of human glia, we engrafted human glial progenitor cells (GPCs) into neonatal immunodeficient mice. Upon maturation, the recipient brains exhibited large numbers and high proportions of both human glial progenitors and astrocytes. The engrafted human glia were gap junction-coupled to host astroglia, yet retained the size and pleomorphism of hominid astroglia, and propagated Ca2+ signals 3-fold faster than their hosts. 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. Mice allografted with murine GPCs showed no enhancement of either LTP or learning. These findings indicate that human glia differentially enhance both activity-dependent plasticity and learning in mice.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Developmental Neuroscience, Neurology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f7cf5a0dc917be3de89f7c35c38932330ea828dc

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Citations in the corpus

High intelligence: A risk factor for psychological and physiological overexcitabilities (2018, background): “The researchers were able to demonstrate that these transgenic mice consistently made stronger connections, leading them to learn and remember things significantly faster than normal mice (Han et al., 2013).”
Glia and pain: Is chronic pain a gliopathy? (2013, background): “Nerve injury not only induces bFGF in DRG neurons [116] but also produces a delayed bFGF upregulation in astrocytes for maintaining neuropathic pain [110].”
Physiology of Astroglia. (2018, positive): “intra-brain implantation of human glial cell progenitors at postnatal day 1 (637).”
The Search for True Numbers of Neurons and Glial Cells in the Human Brain: A Review of 150 Years of Cell Counting (2016, background): “On the contrary, glial cells perform a long list of essential functions (Baumann and Pham-Dinh, 2001; Haydon, 2001; Ullian et al., 2001; Doetsch, 2003; Nedergaard et al., 2003; Allen and Barres, 2009; Fields, 2010; Han et al., 2013; Kettenmann and Ransom, 2013; Verkhratsky and Butt, 2013).”
Cell biology of astrocyte-synapse interactions (2017, positive): “…species, demonstrating a role for glial cells in regulating synaptogenesis in C. elegans (Colón-Ramos et al., 2007), Drosophila (Muthukumar et al., 2014), Xenopus (Cao and Ko, 2007), rodent (N€agler et al., 2001; Ullian et al., 2001), and human (Hartley et al., 1999; Johnson et al., 2007) neurons.”
Purification and characterization of progenitor and mature human astrocytes reveals transcriptional and functional differences with mouse (2015, positive): “More recently, transplantation of human glial progenitors into mouse brains has been shown to improve learning and memory (Han et al., 2013).”
Astrocyte reactivity and reactive astrogliosis: costs and benefits. (2014, background): “This concept has recently been supported by experiments in which mouse brain cortex was partially humanized by transplanted human astrocytes (90).”