By reprogramming one type of brain cell into another in vivo, researchers have opened the door to new ways of repairing damaged brains.

Gong Chen and his colleagues at Pennsylvania State University in University Park converted reactive glial cells — the cells that flood sites of brain injury — into neurons in the brains of mice. They injected a retrovirus carrying the gene encoding a protein called NeuroD1 into the cortex of normal mice and those engineered to model Alzheimer's disease. The virus delivered the gene to two types of glial cell, resulting in the reprogramming of these cells into functional excitatory or inhibitory neurons.

NeuroD1 also turned human astrocytes, a type of glial cell, into functional neurons in vitro. The authors suggest that the approach could be used to replace neurons lost to injury or disease in humans.

Cell Stem Cell http://doi.org/qq7 (2013)