{"id":109096,"date":"2020-06-24T20:02:19","date_gmt":"2020-06-25T03:02:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/06\/one-time-treatment-generates-new-neurons-eliminates-parkinsons-disease-in-mice"},"modified":"2020-06-24T20:02:19","modified_gmt":"2020-06-25T03:02:19","slug":"one-time-treatment-generates-new-neurons-eliminates-parkinsons-disease-in-mice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/06\/one-time-treatment-generates-new-neurons-eliminates-parkinsons-disease-in-mice","title":{"rendered":"One-Time Treatment Generates New Neurons, Eliminates Parkinson\u2019s Disease in Mice"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Xiang-Dong Fu, PhD, has never been more excited about something in his entire career. He has long studied the basic biology of RNA, a genetic cousin of DNA, and the proteins that bind it. But a single discovery has launched Fu into a completely new field: neuroscience.<\/p>\n

For decades, Fu and his team at University of California San Diego School of Medicine studied a protein called PTB, which is well known for binding RNA and influencing which genes are turned \u201con\u201d or \u201coff\u201d in a cell. To study the role of a protein like PTB, scientists often manipulate cells to reduce the amount of that protein, and then watch to see what happens.<\/p>\n

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But then he noticed something odd after a couple of weeks \u2014 there were very few fibroblasts left. Almost the whole dish was instead filled with neurons.<\/p>\n

In this serendipitous way, the team discovered that inhibiting or deleting just a single gene, the gene that encodes PTB, transforms several types of mouse cells directly into neurons.<\/p>\n

More recently, Fu and Hao Qian, PhD, another postdoctoral researcher in his lab, took the finding a big step forward, applying it in what could one day be a new therapeutic approach for Parkinson\u2019s disease and other neurodegenerative diseases. Just a single treatment to inhibit PTB in mice converted native astrocytes, star-shaped support cells of the brain, into neurons that produce the neurotransmitter dopamine. As a result, the mice\u2019s Parkinson\u2019s disease symptoms disappeared.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Xiang-Dong Fu, PhD, has never been more excited about something in his entire career. He has long studied the basic biology of RNA, a genetic cousin of DNA, and the proteins that bind it. But a single discovery has launched Fu into a completely new field: neuroscience. For decades, Fu and his team at University [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":461,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,412,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-109096","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-genetics","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109096","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/461"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=109096"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109096\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=109096"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=109096"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=109096"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}