Xiang-Dong Fu, Ph.D., has never ever been more ecstatic about something in his whole profession. He has actually long studied the standard biology of RNA, a genetic cousin of DNA, and the proteins that bind it. But a single discovery has actually released Fu into a completely brand-new field: neuroscience.
For years, Fu and his group at University of California San Diego School of Medication studied a protein called PTB, which is popular for binding RNA and affecting which genes are turned “on” or “off” in a cell. To study the function of a protein like PTB, researchers often manipulate cells to decrease the amount of that protein, and after that enjoy to see what happens.
Numerous years back, a postdoctoral scientist working in Fu’s lab was taking that approach, utilizing a strategy called siRNA to silence the PTB gene in connective tissue cells understood as fibroblasts.
However then he observed something odd after a number of weeks– there were really couple of fibroblasts left. Almost the whole meal was instead filled with nerve cells.
In this serendipitous method, the group discovered that hindering or erasing just a single gene, the gene that encodes PTB, changes a number of types of mouse cells straight into neurons.
More just recently, Fu and Hao Qian, Ph.D., another postdoctoral researcher in his lab, took the discovering a huge step forward, applying it in what could one day be a new restorative method for Parkinson’s illness and other neurodegenerative diseases Simply a single treatment to prevent PTB in mice transformed native astrocytes, star-shaped assistance cells of the brain, into nerve cells that produce the neurotransmitter dopamine As a result, the mice’s Parkinson’s disease signs disappeared.
The research study is published June 24, 2020 in Nature
” Researchers around the world have actually attempted lots of methods to create neurons in the lab, using stem cells and other ways, so we can study them much better, as well as to utilize them to replace lost neurons in neurodegenerative diseases,” stated Fu, who is a Differentiated Professor in the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medication at UC San Diego School of Medicine. “The fact that we might produce many neurons in such a fairly simple way came as a huge surprise.”
There are a number of different ways to simulate Parkinson’s illness in mice. In this case, the scientists used a dopamine look-a-like particle to poison neurons that produce dopamine. As an outcome, the mice lose dopamine-producing nerve cells and develop symptoms similar to Parkinson’s disease, such as motion deficiencies.
The treatment works lik