Building neurons from mouse tail!!

Fascinating report on how neurons can be built from body cells, I guess this where neuroscience meets genome to make bio-tech more effective.

"In a feat of cellular alchemy, connective tissue from a mouse's tail has been transformed directly into working brain cells.

Ordinarily, so drastic a makeover would require the creation of so-called induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells and then turning these into neurons, an inefficient process that can take weeks.

Marius Wernig and colleagues at Stanford University in California discovered that inserting a cocktail of three genes into fibroblasts turns them directly into neurons in just days. "The real surprise was that this conversion is extremely efficient," he says.

By many indications, these neurons are the real deal. Under a microscope, they look like a kind of mouse brain cell found in the cortex and they can form synapses to send and receive signals from others. Wernig expects that the cells will integrate into a mouse's brain - an experiment that's in the works.

If they do, cells produced using a similar process might one day be used to treat conditions such as Parkinson's disease in humans."

Since they can create neurons in a petri-dish, I hope this helps neuroscience researchers to minimize the animal torture in the name of necessary evil. If we can create and regenerate neurons in a lab, then I wonder if this makes this project easier?