In response to various stressors, cells can enter a state called cellular senescence which is characterized by irreversible cell cycle arrest and a senescence-associated secretory phenotype (SASP). The progressive accumulation of senescent glial cells in the central nervous system (CNS) with aging suggests a potential...
The cause of dopaminergic cell death in the substantia nigra of patients with Parkinson’s disease is unknown”: thus begins the Lancet paper published by Shapira et al. in 1989. Thirty-four years later, while this statement remains largely true, substantial advances have been made in this field. Crucially,...
We have developed an efficient approach to generate functional induced dopaminergic (DA) neurons from adult human dermal fibroblasts. When performing DA neuronal conversion of patient fibroblasts with idiopathic Parkinson’s disease (PD), we could specifically detect disease-relevant pathology in these cells. We show that the patient-derived...
Understanding the pathophysiology of CNS-associated neurological diseases has been hampered by the inaccessibility of patient brain tissue to perform live analyses at the molecular level. To this end, neural cells obtained by differentiation of patient-derived induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) are considerably helpful, especially in...
The direct reprogramming of adult skin fibroblasts to neurons is thought to be controlled by a small set of interacting gene regulators. Here, we investigate how the interaction dynamics between these regulating factors coordinate cellular decision making in direct neuronal reprogramming. We put forward a...
Background Although Huntington’s disease (HD) is caused by a single dominant gene, it is clear that there are genetic modifiers that may influence the age of onset and disease progression. Objectives We sought to investigate whether new inflammation-related genetic variants may contribute to the onset...
