[Subin (OP)]

Hello everyone,,
over to Dr. Maurice Curtis, Deputy Director of this brain bank on some of the results from the samples to date.

Maurice -   So, one of the things I've been interested in are the stem cells in the Nerve Cellbrain.  These are cells that have the capacity to divide and become any other cell type in the whole body actually.  but in this case in the brain, they would normally go on to become either glial cells which are the supporting cells of the nervous system or neurons which are kind of the active unit of the brain.  These stem cells we'd would always thought were very important during the development of the brain.  In fact, it's those stem cells that produce about 160 billion neurons in the course of about 4 or 5 weeks when we are developing.  But once your born, the thought has always been that you don't have any more stem cells in the brain.

Hannah -   So, the number of cells in your brain that you are born with, people used to think that that was it for life.  So, if you have any trauma or if you do any damage to your brain then you can't replace those cells.  That was the traditional hypothesis.

Maurice -   That's right.  That's what I was taught when I first started at the university.  Only a few years later and I can still remember where I was standing when I read the paper in 1998 which indicated a paper that showed unequivocally that the brain produces new brain cells.  That was staggering to me and I thought I have to know more about this.  And so, we were actually interested in the Huntington's disease brain for the reason that the area that the stem cells reside is exactly next door right - they're neighbours - right next door to the area that actually degenerates in Huntington's disease.  So, you've got this interesting situation where in Huntington's disease, the regenerative area and the degenerative area are neighbours.  They're right next to each other.  So, the areas that we're referring to when we say the stem cell area is an area called the subventricular zone that sits right next to the lateral ventricle in the brain that's the fluid-filled space in the middle of the brain.  Just next to the subventricular zone is the caudate nucleus.  The caudate nucleus is the area that degenerates in Huntington's disease and it normally is involved with mood and movement and hints people with Huntington's disease of problems with movement and also, they can have mood disturbances.  And so, we were interested to see whether or not the area that is responsible for regenerating the brain at least during development was upregulated or whether more stem cells were born in that area, in response to the area next door, the caudate nucleus degenerating.  And so, we used some special stains and what we found was that the more degeneration that was occurring in the caudate nucleus, the more regenerating cells or the more stem cells we found in the area next door the subventricular zone.

Hannah -   Maurice Curtis on how a bank full of frozen human brains can tell us about Huntington's disease.  If you would also like to donate your body and brain to research, further information and links are on our website.  That's nakedscientists.com/neuroscience and have a look for the show called Naked in a brain bank…