In adult mammals, injured neurons regenerate extensively within the PNS but poorly, if at all, within the CNS. We have studied the effect of substrata consisting of tissue sections from various nervous systems on nerve fiber growth in culture and correlated our results with the growth potential of these tissues in vivo. Ganglionic explants from embryonic chicks (9-12 d) fail to extend nerve fib...

The vocal control nucleus (HVc) of the songbird forebrain undergoes neurogenesis in adulthood, as ventricular zone precursor cells divide, and their daughter cells migrate into the subjacent forebrain and differentiate into neurons. A procedure is now described by which the migration and development of these new neurons can be directly observed in vitro, in explant cultures of the adult canary ...

A cell culture platform for neuron aggregates has been designed and fabricated as an in vitro model for studying CNS myelination. The device is composed of nine culture chambers each of which has 55 cell trapping sites for culturing neuron aggregates in a spatially controlled environments in parallel. Neuron aggregates prepared from embryonic day 16 rat fetus were cultured with oligodendrocyte ...

Oligodendroglia growth factor (OGF) is a 16-kDa soluble protein produced by neuronal cell lines. This factor, when incubated with brain glia in culture, selectively stimulates growth of oligodendroglia, the myelin-producing cells of the CNS. OGF infused into the cerebral cortex of the adult rat accelerates the production of myelin proteins as shown by increased specific activity of the myelin e...

Axotomy-induced motor neuron death occurs within a week in the neonatal rat and mouse. However, slowly progressive motor neuron death, which takes more than a month, occurs after axotomy in the adult mouse (C57BL/6) but not in the adult rat (Wistar). Here we demonstrate that expression of a p53-inducible Bcl-2 homology domain 3 (BH3)-only protein, Noxa, is enhanced in axotomized neurons of the ...

The rodent superior cervical ganglion (SCG) is a useful and readily accessible source of neurons for studying the mechanisms of sympathetic nervous system (SNS) development and growth in vitro. The sympathetic nervous system (SNS) of early postnatal animals undergoes a great deal of remodeling and development; thus, neurons taken from mice at this age are primed to re-grow and establish synapti...

Human embryonic stem (ES) cells are undifferentiated pluripotent cells derived from the inner cell mass of blastocyst stage embryos. These unique cell lines have the potential to form virtually any cell type in the body and can be propagated in vitro indefinitely in an undifferentiated state. These cells are capable of forming embryoid bodies (EB) that contain cells from all three embryonic lin...

Embryonic or neonatal rat neurons retain plasticity and are readily grown in tissue culture, but neurons of the adult brain were thought to be terminally differentiated and therefore difficult to culture. Recent studies, however, suggest that it may be possible to culture differentiated neurons from the hippocampus of adult rats. We modified these procedures to grow differentiated neurons from ...