YAISHWARYAJ: Brain cells can live longer

Brain cells can live longer

Brain cells can long outlive the animal to which they originally belonged, if transplanted into a different brain, new research suggests.

Precursor cerebellar neurons from the developing mouse were transplanted into rat embryos which can live on average nearly twice as long as the donor mouse strain. The transplanted neurons developed into normal neurons that made themselves at home in the rat brains, though they retained a mouse-like size and shape. Moreover, these cells survived for as long as their rat hosts, or up to 36 months, roughly twice as long as the average lifespan of the donor mice.

The findings suggest that the lifespan of the transplanted neurons is not genetically fixed and may have been determined by the rat brain "microenvironment"

research by

Magrassi and colleagues

published in

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences