Neurogenesis articles from across Nature Portfolio

Challenging the belief that sympathetic ganglia are an innovation of jawed vertebrates, a study reports the presence of sympathetic neurons in an extant jawless vertebrate, the sea lamprey Petromyzon marinus.

In Zebrafish embryos spinal cords, neural precursors are clustered in two distinct populations based on their spindle-microtubule enrichment. KIF16Ba, CAMSAP2a/3a and spindle-microtubule enrichment control Sara endosome motility and mediate neural precursor fates.

Xu et al. use single-cell transcriptomics to reveal that targeted and systemic partial reprogramming restore the production of neuronal progenitors and new neurons in old mice and show a cell-autonomous effect of reprogramming in cultures of aged neural stem cells.

Coquand, Brunet Avalos et al. develop an imaging method to map basal radial glial cell division in human fetal tissue and cerebral organoids and detect abundant symmetric amplifying, but also direct neurogenic divisions bypassing intermediate progenitors.

A basket-like device records the electrical activity of neural organoids over months of maturation.

In mice, specific pools of adult neural stem cells are recruited during pregnancy to support postpartum maternal behaviour.

Genetic studies have associated thousands of non-coding variants with Alzheimer’s disease (AD), yet the functions of these variants remain elusive. We conducted cell-type-specific genetic fine mapping of AD variants and performed extensive functional characterization to unravel the causal variants that contribute to transcriptional regulation and AD­related phenotypes in microglia.

Cross-ancestry genome-wide association meta-analyses of neuroimaging genetics data from European and East Asian populations identified 339 genetic variant–hippocampal volumetric trait associations (23 new). Further cross-ancestry analyses revealed similar genetic effects on hippocampal volumetric traits between ancestries, with improved fine-mapping precision and predictive accuracy of polygenic scores in the under-represented East Asian population.

In adult Drosophila, the sense of touch is mediated by mechanosensory organs, namely tactile bristles in the epidermis. A new study reveals that a previously unknown type of epidermal cell, named the F-cell, is recruited to ensheath the tactile bristle and is required for touch sensing.