How neural stem cells can become blood vessels
This discovery could have important repercussions on the advance in treatment of diseases as different as paediatric tumours and Parkinson's. "We believe that the ability to produce blood vessels from neural stems cells could directly affect the growth of certain types of tumours on the infant population," said the project's main researcher, Ricardo Pardal. The carotid body is a small structure of nerve tissue situated at the fork of the carotid artery. Its function is to act as a chemoreceptor in the blood. It monitors oxygen pressure in the blood and plays a role in the regulation of breathing. The plasticity of adult mother cells, or the somatic mother cells, to cross boundaries and to differ in unrelated cell types has been a subject of debate in the last decade. The stem cells that come from the neural crest (NCSCs) show notable plasticity during their development, but it is not known if adult NCSCs maintain this plasticity. In this sense, "we descr...