The Predominant Neural Stem Cell Isolated from Postnatal and Adult Forebrain But Not Early Embryonic Forebrain Expresses GFAP

Rapid recovery of segmental neurological function in a tetraplegic patient following transplantation of fetal olfactory bulb-derived cells

“…Nestin is known to be positive in cultured human stem cells 30 and GFAP is also now considered a possible stem cell marker. 31,32 We do not find such strong GFAP labeling in human OEG cultures and suggest that the observed cells may be astrocytes. It should be noted that it is not known with certainty at what developmental stage the human fetal OB becomes populated by OEGs 12,33,34 and the spectrum of cell types that are present in the primary cultures has not been published.…”

Migration and differentiation of neural precursor cells can be directed by microglia

“…The observation of cells stained positive for both astrocytic (GFAP) and neuronal (␤III) markers may be explained by recent findings showing that many precursor cells, although displaying all of the characteristics of neural stem cells, express GFAP (28,29).…”

Transforming growth factor α promotes sequential conversion of mature astrocytes into neural progenitors and stem cells

“…The demonstration that neurospheres, considered as signing for the presence of neural stem cells (Reynolds et al, 1992), can be derived from astrocytes sub-cultured for a week in EGF-or EGF-and FGF-containing medium (Laywell et al, 2000;Imura et al, 2003), has additionally pointed to the possibility that mature astrocytes themselves might behave as stem cells at least in vitro. But the brevity of the time course required to obtain neurospheres from astrocyte cultures (7 DIV) and its similarity with that required to obtain neurospheres from brain germinal zones (Reynolds et al, 1992) suggest that they correspond to GFAPexpressing neural stem cells preserved in the cortical astrocyte cultures used (Imura et al, 2006).…”

“…However, a distinct, much less abundant population of GFAP-expressing cells behaving as neural stem cells coexists with astrocytes in the germinal zones of the post-natal and adult brain, and possibly in non-neurogenic regions (Doetsch, 2003). The presence of such cells has been detected at a low frequency in astrocyte cultures through their capability to form floating cellular spheres (Laywell et al, 2000;Imura et al, 2003). Consequently, we developed culture conditions depleted of this cell type.…”