It is that time of the year again, when grown men don brightly coloured lycra to sweat and grunt their way around the worlds most gruelling sporting event, the Tour de France.
And every year at about this time the numbers of cyclists seems to quadruple on the roads as we are inspired to get off the couch and do something by the athletic feats of Cadel, Lance and co. But what has got to do with stem cells you ask? Well there has been some interesting research lately about how exercise affects the stem cells in our brain.
In a recent publication in
Cell Stem Cell Dr Fred Gage and colleagues at the Salk Institute in San Diego have proved that our brains produce new brain cells and that exercise increases this production. In the experiments, rats and mice that ran on little wheels developed many new neurons, and then put them to good use by acing mazes and other rodent IQ tests. It seems that this process of increasing the production of brain cells (the process is known as neurogenesis) actually improves thinking.
Related studies led by Dr Jack Kessler at Northwestern University in Chicago have also shown that exercise increases neurogenesis. While scientists are yet to determine the exact mechanisms behind the results and the experiments are all on rodents at this stage, what they do know is that mercifully the process seems to have a natural inbuilt plateau and we don’t have to participate in 3000km bike rides to enjoy the benefits. Even a small amount of exercise should do us good!
Read more about exercise and stem cells in a recent blog post in the
New York Times.
ASCC funded researcher and leading neuroscientist Professor Perry Bartlett at the Queensland Brain Institute is looking into Endogenous Neural Stem Cells: Function and Regulation, read more about his
research here.