Scientists accidentally reprogram mature mouse GABA neurons into dopaminergic-like neurons

"Initially, I was a little disappointed that we converted medium spiny neurons instead of glia," says first author Chun-Li Zhang, a professor of molecular biology at UT Southwestern Medical Center (@UTSWNews). "But when we realized the novelty of our results, we were kind of amazed. To our knowledge, changing the phenotype of resident, already-mature neurons has never been accomplished before."

Dopaminergic cells are important for controlling voluntary movement and emotions such as motivation and reward that drive behavior. They are often lost in movement disorders like Parkinson's disease. Many neuroscientists are interested in the therapeutic potential of creating new dopaminergic cells.

张先生和他的团队试图诱导的神经胶质cells surrounding neurons with protective and other functions -- to morph inside live mouse brains. They injected a viral vector to express a cocktail of proteins into the striatum, a region of the brain rich in GABAergic neurons that help control muscle movement. The cocktail consisted of three transcription factors, NURR1, FOXA2, and LMX1A, which help decode genetic instructions for building dopaminergic neurons. The mice were also treated with valproic acid, which was previously shown to play a role in cell reprogramming.

The team targeted glial cells due to their ability to regenerate and multiply more readily than neurons, theoretically making them better therapeutic candidates. But when they looked at the brain slices of the injected mice, they found the glia unchanged. Instead, some GABAergic medium spiny neurons -- cells that are directly controlled by dopaminergic neurons -- had transformed.

The new cells appeared to behave more like native dopaminergic neurons, although they also retained residual features of the medium spiny neurons. They showed rhythmic activity and formed network connections similarly to dopaminergic cells, as the researchers discovered through electrode recordings and reporter assays.

Subsequent immunohistochemistry and reporter assays revealed that the new cells sprung from mature medium spiny neurons without passing through a proliferative progenitor stage.

“我们的研究结果提供了一个新的视角神经plasticity," says Zhang. "We traditionally think of mature cell identity and function as fixed, but our findings suggest that they are more dependent on biochemical factors in their environment than we thought. This could mean that no cell type is fixed even for a functional, mature neuron."

Zhang and his team next seek to address some of the limitations of their findings by clarifying the exact reprogramming mechanism and, of course, identifying the conditions that can reprogram glia into dopaminergic neurons, as they originally sought.

"We hope that the ability to change neuron identity will someday be directed to treat neurological diseases, including Parkinson's disease," says Zhang.