A competitive advantage by neonatally engrafted human glial progenitors yields mice whose brains are chimeric for human glia

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articleResearchpeer-review

  • Martha S Windrem
  • Steven J Schanz
  • Carolyn Morrow
  • Jared Munir
  • Devin Chandler-Militello
  • Su Wang
  • Goldman, Steven Alan

Neonatally transplanted human glial progenitor cells (hGPCs) densely engraft and myelinate the hypomyelinated shiverer mouse. We found that, in hGPC-xenografted mice, the human donor cells continue to expand throughout the forebrain, systematically replacing the host murine glia. The differentiation of the donor cells is influenced by the host environment, such that more donor cells differentiated as oligodendrocytes in the hypomyelinated shiverer brain than in myelin wild-types, in which hGPCs were more likely to remain as progenitors. Yet in each recipient, both the number and relative proportion of mouse GPCs fell as a function of time, concomitant with the mitotic expansion and spread of donor hGPCs. By a year after neonatal xenograft, the forebrain GPC populations of implanted mice were largely, and often entirely, of human origin. Thus, neonatally implanted hGPCs outcompeted and ultimately replaced the host population of mouse GPCs, ultimately generating mice with a humanized glial progenitor population. These human glial chimeric mice should permit us to define the specific contributions of glia to a broad variety of neurological disorders, using human cells in vivo.

Original languageEnglish
JournalThe Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience
Volume34
Issue number48
Pages (from-to)16153-61
Number of pages9
ISSN0270-6474
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 26 Nov 2014

    Research areas

  • Animals, Animals, Newborn, Chimera, Female, Fetal Stem Cells, Humans, Male, Mice, Mice, Transgenic, Neuroglia, Prosencephalon, Stem Cell Transplantation

ID: 152956021