Newborn Neurons in the Adult Brain: Real Deal, or Glial Imposters?

12 Apr 2018

Deep in the hippocampus, are new neurons born throughout life? Just when scientists were about to reach some consensus that the answer was yes, two recent studies disagree. In the April 5 Cell Stem Cell, Maura Boldrini and colleagues at Columbia University, New York, report that adult neurogenesis not only exists, but remains steady into old age. The researchers counted newborn neurons in samples from people aged 14–79 years, and came up with similar numbers. In the March 7 Nature, researchers led by Arturo Alvarez-Buylla at the University of California, San Francisco, reported that while neural progenitors abounded in postmortem hippocampi from prenatal or early childhood brains, they fell off the map by age 7. What gives? In older people, some of the cells that expressed markers of budding neurons turned out to be glia, the authors claim.