A mouse with human Astrocytes

Windrem MS, Schanz SJ, Morrow C, Munir J, Chandler-Militello D, Wang S, Goldman SA. A competitive advantage by neonatally engrafted human glial progenitors yields mice whose brains are chimeric for human glia. J Neurosci. 2014 Nov 26;34(48):16153-61.

Neonatally transplanted human glial progenitor cells (hGPCs) densely engraft and myelinate the hypomyelinated shiverermouse. We found that, in hGPC-xenografted mice, the human donor cells continue to expand throughout the forebrain, systematically replacing the host murine glia. The differentiation of the donor cells is influenced by the host environment, such that more donor cells differentiated as oligodendrocytes in the hypomyelinated shiverer brain than in myelin wild-types, in which hGPCs were more likely to remain as progenitors. Yet in each recipient, both the number and relative proportion of mouse GPCs fell as a function of time, concomitant with the mitotic expansion and spread of donor hGPCs. By a year after neonatal xenograft, the forebrain GPC populations of implanted mice were largely, and often entirely, of human origin. Thus, neonatally implanted hGPCs outcompeted and ultimately replaced the host population of mouse GPCs, ultimately generating mice with a humanized glial progenitor population. These human glial chimeric mice should permit us to define the specific contributions of glia to a broad variety of neurological disorders, using human cells in vivo.

The Goldman Lab has taken non-myelinating mouse mutants and transplanted in oligodendrocytes and these mice have human oligodendrocytes and myelin, in this study they transplant in human astrocyte precursors and after a year the human astrocytes have replaced the mouse ones. This new model provides a tool to study human astrocyte function but you are not going to get many experiments done, if you have to wait for a year for this to happen

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