Adult stem cells: Fat to brain
Friday January 26th, 2007 @ 10:41:14 EST
From Category: Differentiation
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Tokyo, Japan -
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The ability to adipose derived stem cells to differentiate into a variety of tissues is well known. Primarily, adipose derived stem cells are mesenchymal-like, however, they are also known to differentiate into endothelial cells. Some authors have published that not only can adipose derived stem cells differentiate into neurons, but that they are also effective at the treatment of spinal cord injury (Kang SK et al. Autologous adipose tissue-derived stromal cells for treatment of spinal cord injury. Stem Cells Dev. 2006 Aug;15(4):583-94).
In a recent paper (Nagase et al. Neurospheres From Human Adipose Tissue Transplanted Into Cultured Mouse Embryos can Contribute to Craniofacial Morphogenesis: A Preliminary Report. J Craniofac Surg. 2007 Jan;18(1):49-53) it was published that adipose derived stem cells can be used to generate neurospheres in vitro. Interestingly these neurospheres, which contain neural stem cells, and express the neural markers Nestin and Musashi-1, were able to actually differentiate in vivo. The investigators marked the adipose derived neurospheres with GFP using viral transfection and injected the cells into the head region of mouse embryos. As the embryos developed the transplanted cells migrated in a manner similar to cranial neural crest cells.
This paper suggests the interesting possibility that adult stem cells may be useful for generating a variety of new tissues, including during embryogenesis.
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