{"id":217582,"date":"2025-07-10T22:09:38","date_gmt":"2025-07-11T03:09:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/07\/looking-to-study-neurological-conditions-researchers-produce-over-400-different-types-of-nerve-cells"},"modified":"2025-07-10T22:09:38","modified_gmt":"2025-07-11T03:09:38","slug":"looking-to-study-neurological-conditions-researchers-produce-over-400-different-types-of-nerve-cells","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/07\/looking-to-study-neurological-conditions-researchers-produce-over-400-different-types-of-nerve-cells","title":{"rendered":"Looking to study neurological conditions, researchers produce over 400 different types of nerve cells"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/looking-to-study-neurological-conditions-researchers-produce-over-400-different-types-of-nerve-cells.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Nerve cells are not just nerve cells. Depending on how finely we distinguish, there are several hundred to several thousand different types of nerve cells in the human brain, according to the latest calculations. These cell types vary in their function, in the number and length of their cellular appendages, and in their interconnections. They emit different neurotransmitters into our synapses, and depending on the region of the brain\u2014for example, the cerebral cortex or the midbrain\u2014different cell types are active.<\/p>\n<p>When scientists produced <a href=\"https:\/\/medicalxpress.com\/tags\/nerve+cells\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">nerve cells<\/a> from <a href=\"https:\/\/medicalxpress.com\/tags\/stem+cells\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">stem cells<\/a> in Petri dishes for their experiments in the past, it was not possible to take their vast diversity into account. Until now, researchers had only developed procedures for growing a few dozen different types of nerve cell in vitro. They achieved this using <a href=\"https:\/\/medicalxpress.com\/tags\/genetic+engineering\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">genetic engineering<\/a> or by adding signaling molecules to activate particular cellular signaling pathways. However, they never got close to achieving the diversity of hundreds or thousands of different nerve cell types that actually exist.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cNeurons derived from stem cells are frequently used to study diseases. But up to now, researchers have often ignored which precise types of neuron they are working with,\u201d says Barbara Treutlein, Professor at the Department of Biosystems <i>Science<\/i> and Engineering at ETH Zurich in Basel.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Nerve cells are not just nerve cells. Depending on how finely we distinguish, there are several hundred to several thousand different types of nerve cells in the human brain, according to the latest calculations. These cell types vary in their function, in the number and length of their cellular appendages, and in their interconnections. They [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":661,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1902,11,412,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-217582","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bioengineering","category-biotech-medical","category-genetics","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217582","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\/661"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=217582"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217582\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=217582"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=217582"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=217582"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}