Adult neurogenesis plays an important role in brain function, brain homeostasis, and brain repair. Although adult NSCs produce neurons through self-renewal and differentiation during the lifetime, it has been recently reported that adult NSCs lose the...
Adult neurogenesis plays an important role in brain function, brain homeostasis, and brain repair. Although adult NSCs produce neurons through self-renewal and differentiation during the lifetime, it has been recently reported that adult NSCs lose their stem cell characteristics with aging, and the pool of NSCs and adult neurogenesis decrease in rodent brain. However, how the NSCs lose their stemness with aging is unknown. Interestingly, in an immortalized human mammary epithelial stem-like cell line, old mitochondria are asymmetrically apportioned between two daughter cells during mitosis, and daughter cell with fewer old mitochondria maintains stemness. In this study, I investigated whether aged mitochondria are asymmetrically segregated during mitosis of embryonic mouse NSCs and whether this phenomenon is associated with NSC aging, using the tetracycline-inducible mitochondria-targeted GFP (mito-GFP). It was found that old mitochondria were not asymmetrically segregated during mitosis of embryonic NSCs under the self-renewal and differentiation conditions. In addition, expression of the reduction-oxidation sensitive GFP (roGFP), which detects the mitochondrial redox state, did not show any evidence for the functional asymmetry of mitochondria during mitosis. Moreover, Vimentin, which is known to be asymmetrically segregated with damaged proteins, was not asymmetrically segregated during mitosis of embryonic NSCs. Collectively, this study suggests that embryonic mouse NSCs may not asymmetrically segregate aging factors, although excluded is a possibility that embryonic mouse NSCs are not old enough to have aged or nonfunctional components.