Arnold Krickstein discusses the significance of in utero electroporation in studying early cortical development. This technique allows for gain and loss of function experiments on genes involved in neuron generation and migration.
My name is Arnold Krickstein. I'm The director of the Institute of Regeneration Medicine here at UCSF, and my area of interest is in developmental neurobiology. Specifically, we're very interested in early stages of cortical development and we've been looking at neural stem and progenitor cells and studying the way they generate neurons and how those neurons migrate and begin to form circuits into the developing Brain, especially in the cortex.
Well, the advent of in utero Electroporation, I think has been one of those transformative technologies introduced by SDO and his colleagues in terms of studying early stages of brain development because this allows you to do gain and loss of function experiments for a whole variety of genes. And to do it relatively simply by introducing those genes directly into the neural stem and progenitor cells that are making neurons during early cortical development. The technique really involves simply injecting DNA in the form of a plasmid into the cerebral ventricles in an embryonic stage animal, and then applying a brief electrical current that drives those plasmids into the cells that line the ventricle, which are the radio GL neuro epithelial type cells that then produce neurons and ultimately glial cells.
繁體中文
