Mini Brains & More: Stem Cells In Neuroscience

Abstract

Everyone has once wondered: what if I were able to go back in time? Fueled either by the Back to the Future franchise or an embarrassing mistake, almost everyone has played around with the idea of returning to an earlier state. Imagine being able to go back to your childhood, before decisions that have brought you to where you are now. Now bring that idea to a much smaller scale. Imagine applying that idea to the cells in our body. Early in development, progenitor (stem) cells have the capability to differentiate into different types (neurons, cardiomyocytes, etc). During development, cells become more specialized over time and as an organism matures, they become more limited in the types of cells they can differentiate into [1]. Scientists are now able to perform cellular “time travel” through induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), taking mature cells back to a stage of pluripotency, when they are able to specialize into almost any cell type (with a few exceptions).