Brain Reboot

Some mornings you might feel your brain needs some help waking up. That's true on the cellular level too. As we get older, the stem cells in our brain become dormant – they stop making new neurons to support learning and memory. That's why our brains often slow down with age, and the same phenomenon is linked to mental illnesses and neurodegenerative diseases. Now, scientists have discovered a way of rebooting the brain's stem cells. Here, we see newly-produced (highlighted in red) and immature (green) neurons in brain tissue from elderly (c. 1yr-old) mice (blue). Researchers persuaded stem cells to make these neurons by using a drug to block a protein called mitochondrial pyruvate carrier (MPC). Blocking MPC reprograms the metabolism of these stem cells, switching them back into an active state. Better understanding this process could help scientists develop new treatment strategies for conditions where the brain doesn't make enough new neurons.

Written by Henry Stennett

Henry Stennett

Writer

Henry is a science communicator at Cancer Research UK and a freelance writer. He used to research microbiology but now he’s got the writing bug.

• Image from work by Francesco Petrelli and Valentina Scandella, and colleagues
• Department of Biomedical Sciences, University of Lausanne, Lausanne and Department of Cell Biology, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Science Advances, March 2023