Sugar in the brain

Tokyo, Japan -

It is known that a wide variety of factors are capable of inducing neurogenesis in the adult brain. For example, post-stroke neurogenesis is known to be at least partially dependent on eryothropoietin signaling (Tsai et al. A critical role of erythropoietin receptor in neurogenesis and post-stroke recovery. J Neurosci. 2006 Jan 25;26(4):1269-74.).

Administration of exogenous EPO into the rat model of stroke was demonstrated to cause significant inhibition of pathology via upregulation of VEGF and BDNF production (Wang et al. Treatment of stroke with erythropoietin enhances neurogenesis and angiogenesis and improves neurological function in rats. Stroke. 2004 Jul;35(7):1732-7.)

Stimulation of neurogenesis may even be possible with clinically used statin drugs, which have been demonstrated to accelerate functional recovery in the middle cerebral artery occlusion model (Chen et al. Atorvastatin induction of VEGF and BDNF promotes brain plasticity after stroke in mice. J Cereb Blood Flow Metab. 2005 Feb;25(2):281-90)

Additionally, during pregnancy it is known that neurogenesis occurs, presumably mediated by various endocrine factors such as prolactin (Shingo et al. Pregnancy-stimulated neurogenesis in the adult female forebrain mediated by prolactin. Science. 2003 Jan 3;299(5603):117-20).

Given that a wide variety of agents are capable of exerting effects in the adult brain, it was investigated in a recent paper (Sakaguchi et al. Expression and function of galectin-1 in adult neural stem cells. Cell Mol Life Sci. 2007 Mar 15;) whether neural stem cells are capable of binding to sugars. It was identified that the sugar binding protein Galectin-1 is found at high concentration of various neural stem cells.

This study opens the possibility that various carbohydrates may be useful for the modulation of neural stem cell proliferation.