{"id":98051,"date":"2019-11-01T13:22:43","date_gmt":"2019-11-01T20:22:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/11\/making-new-neurons-for-recovery-after-brain-injury"},"modified":"2019-11-01T13:22:43","modified_gmt":"2019-11-01T20:22:43","slug":"making-new-neurons-for-recovery-after-brain-injury","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/11\/making-new-neurons-for-recovery-after-brain-injury","title":{"rendered":"Making \u201cNew\u201d Neurons for Recovery After Brain Injury"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/making-new-neurons-for-recovery-after-brain-injury2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>One of the most intriguing developments in the so-called golden age of neuroscience has been the growing understanding of \u201cneuroplasticity\u201d: the brain\u2019s ability to constantly reshape itself and constantly learn new things by forging new connections throughout one\u2019s lifetime \u2014 to grow proportions of gray matter and even shift brain activity to different regions of the brain.<\/p>\n<p>Now a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.helmholtz-muenchen.de\/isf\/forschung\/arbeitsgruppen\/neurale-stammzellen\/forschungsthemen\/index.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">new research effort<\/a> is taking the concept of neuroplasticity further \u2014 looking at diseased and injured brains that have permanently lost neurons. The effort, led by neuroscientist Magdalena G\u00f6tz, explores whether \u201castrocytes\u201d \u2014 non-neuronal, structural cells in the brain, can be reprogrammed to take up the tasks the neurons once performed.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cEverybody is astonished, at the moment, that it works,\u201d says Nicola Mattugini, a neurobiologist at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany, when she <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cell.com\/neuron\/fulltext\/S0896-6273(19)30693-2\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">presented her team\u2019s results<\/a> at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in San Diego, California. Their team reprogrammed the astrocytes in lab mice.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of the most intriguing developments in the so-called golden age of neuroscience has been the growing understanding of \u201cneuroplasticity\u201d: the brain\u2019s ability to constantly reshape itself and constantly learn new things by forging new connections throughout one\u2019s lifetime \u2014 to grow proportions of gray matter and even shift brain activity to different regions of [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":511,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-98051","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98051","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\/511"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=98051"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98051\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=98051"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=98051"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=98051"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}