Sign up for Table of Contents Alerts.
Email this page
Print this page
Brief Report
Individual Adult Human Neurons Display Aneuploidy: Detection by Fluorescence In Situ Hybridization and Single Neuron PCR
Svetlana D. Pack, Robert J. Weil, Alexander O. Vortmeyer, Weifen Zeng, Jie Li, Hiroaki Okamoto, Makoto Furuta, Evgenia Pak, Irina A. Lubensky, Edward H. Oldfield and Zhengping Zhuang
volume 4 | issue 12
december 2005Pages: 1758 - 1760
We now provide open access to journal articles published online for one year or more. This article may be downloaded at the following link:
Download PDF If the document does not open, please right-click on the link (control-click on a Macintosh) and select the option to save the file to disk.
Neurons, once committed, exit the cell cycle and undergo maturation that promote specialized activity and are believed to operate upon a stable genome. We used fluorescence in situ hybridization, selective cell microdissection, and loss of heterozygosity analysis to assess degree of aneuploidy in patients with a neurodegenerative disease and in normal controls. We found that aneuploidy occurs in approximately 40% of mature, adult human neurons in health or disease and may be a physiological mechanism that maintains neuronal fate and function; it does not appear to be an unstable state. The fact that neuronal stem cells can be identified in adult humans and that somatic mosaicism may be found in neuronal precursor cells deserves further investigation before using adult neural stem cells to treat human disease.
We now provide open access to journal articles published online for one year or more. This article may be downloaded at the following link:
Download PDF If the document does not open, please right-click on the link (control-click on a Macintosh) and select the option to save the file to disk.