A team of researchers at the
Molecular Neurobiology Unit of the University of Valencia, led by Professor of
Cell Biology Isabel Fariñas, just published in the journal Nature
Neuroscience, the results of a research that may shed light on the
maintenance of stem cells in the adult brain, and their activity to produce new
neurons throughout life.
The group has discovered that the Cdkn1a/p21 gene is
essential for maintaining the brain stem cells active and functional. Its
absence causes depletion of these cells, impairing their functioning and
affecting the generation of new neurons, as it occurs at the end of our lives.
Stem cells need p21 to replicate
themselves in a controlled manner. As p21 is a tumor suppressor gene and
regulates the proliferation of neural stem cells, it might be thought that its
inactivation would lead to brain tumors. However, p21 functions differently in
neural stem cells. Its absence does not cause tumors but depletion of neural stem
cells, ie aging. "The reason, Isabel Fariñas says, is that p21 exerts
functions in these cells that are independent of its classical action on the
cell cycle and this is one of the novel aspects of the research."
Isabel Fariñas' team, in
collaboration with the group of Anxo Vidal (University of Santiago de
Compostela), demonstrated that p21 in neural stem cells restrains the
production of molecules that induce the depletion of these cells, which occurs
during aging . "The research allows us to understand better how stem cells
get lost in our brains as we age, and opens the possibility to try to alleviate
this deterioration," Isabel Fariñas says.
Fariñas' team belongs to the
Molecular Neurobiology Unit of the Department of Cell Biology and Parasitology
and to the ERI of Biotechnology and Biomedicine of the University to the Center
for Biomedical Research in Neurodegenerative Diseases (CIBERNED) and to the
RETIC for Cell Therapy and it is Prometeu group of excellence.
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