A team of researchers led by Maureen Condic at the University of Utah School of Medicine in Salt Lake City have found that increasing the expression of a single gene that is important during development dramatically improves the ability of adult neurons to regenerate. The finding may lead to new approaches for treating damage from stroke, spinal cord injury, and other neurological conditions.
Condic and her coworkers found that increasing the expression of genes for receptors called integrin proteins dramatically increased the amount of nerve fiber growth in the adult neurons. The increase in growth was more than ten times greater than that in any other published study of regeneration by adult neurons. The adult neurons with the extra integrin genes were able to extend nerve fibers profusely even when growth-inhibiting proteins were present in the culture. The amount of growth was indistinguishable from that of neurons from newborn animals.
The work was reported in the 1 July 2001 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience.
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