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...

Spinal and bulbar muscular atrophy (Kennedy disease) is an X-linked, adult-onset motor neuron disease characterized by slow, progressive weakness of the extremity muscles with CAG triplet repeat expansion in androgen receptor gene. Hirayama (HD) juvenile onset asymmetric amyotrophy hand most common males Asia. We report a patient atypical Kennedy presenting typical HD.

1. It was shown in the preceding paper that postnatally derived rat superior cervical ganglion neurons (SCGN) will grow in dissociated cell culture and form functional synaptic connections with each other. In this report, synaptic transmission by the postnatal SCGN is detailed. 2. Synaptic interactions between SCGN were blocked by the nicotinic cholinergic antagonist hexamathonium (C-6), indica...

Recently, we have described a simple protocol to obtain an enriched culture of adult stem cells organized in neurospheres from two post-natal tissues: skin and adipose tissue. Due to their possible application in neuronal tissue regeneration, here we tested two kinds of scaffold well known in tissue engineering application: hyaluronan based membranes and fibrin-glue meshes. Neurospheres from sk...

In contrast to mammals, the spinal cord of adult zebrafish has the capacity to reinitiate generation of motor neurons after a lesion. Here we show that genes involved in motor neuron development, i.e., the ventral morphogen sonic hedgehog a (shha), as well as the transcription factors nkx6.1 and pax6, together with a Tg(olig2:egfp) transgene, are expressed in the unlesioned spinal cord of adult...

We exploited the simple organization of bullfrog paravertebral sympathetic ganglia (BFSG) to test whether the neurotransmitter peptide luteinizing hormone releasing hormone (LHRH), which generates the late slow EPSP, could also exert long-term neurotrophic control of ion channel expression. Whole-cell recordings from B-cells in BFSG showed that removal of all of the sources of ganglionic LHRH f...