Neural Stem Cells

This week in class we have been talking about the differentiation among neural cells during development. We read a paper Neural Stem Cells: From Fly to Vertebrates. Now the paper was long and covered a lot of different topic by comparing neural cells of flies to that of vertebrates. There were several questions they wanted to try and answer in this review. I was reading the paper and trying to figure out the answer to each question myself as well, I realized when it comes to neural cells there is still so much we don't know. The development and differentiation of neural cells(vertebrates and flies) is very complex and depends on a variety of extrinsic and intrinsic factors. These factors determine the lineage, proliferation, maintenance, and progeny of the cells. The overall summary of the paper was that there is minimal knowledge on neural stem cells and we only know a small fraction of information. It has become clear that vertebrates and Drosophila share many fundamental mechanisms of neurogenisis, validating a comparative approach. doe_neural_stem_cells.pdf