The novel technique may offer panoramic view into the mechanisms of many diseases and the enigma of aging.
Hospital nurseries routinely place soft bands around the tiny wrists of newborns that hold important identifying information such as name, sex, mother, and birth date. Researchers at Rockefeller University are taking the same approach with newborn brain cells -- but these neonates will keep their ID tags for life, so that scientists can track how they grow and mature, as a means for better understanding the brain's aging process.
Cao studies how tissues and organs maintain stable populations of cells -- a hallmark of health -- so he and his team wanted to investigate how different cellular populations develop, and whether these varied neuronal cells decline in the same way or forge different paths. Tracking their cellular lifespans from birth to maturity would reveal not just differences, but also when they appeared.
The opposite is true in the elderly brain. Progenitor cells rarely become either neurons or glial cells; in fact, virtually every type of brain cell plummets. Most lost are dentate gyrus neuroblasts, which are essential for creating neurons in the hippocampus, a region linked to memory and diseases like Alzheimer's. In comparison to the adult brain, the number of these cells drops by 16-fold in the elderly brain.
Other organs have far higher proportions of progenitor cells than brains do; newborn progenitors account for more than 20 percent of the cells in the colon, for instance. A few years ago, Cao demonstrated the potential for analyzing cell population dynamics in human fetal development by creating a cellular atlas using a similar combinatorial indexing method.
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