Scientists create mice with half-human brains

London, December 7

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Researchers have created mice whose brains are half-human, making the animals smarter than their peers.

The altered mice still have mouse neurons – the “thinking” cells that make up around half of all their brain cells but all the glial cells in their brains, the ones that support the neurons, are human, researchers said.

“It’s still a mouse brain, not a human brain. But all the non-neuronal cells are human,” said Steve Goldman of the University of Rochester Medical Centre in New York.

Goldman’s team extracted immature glial cells from donated human fetuses. They injected them into mouse pups where they developed into astrocytes, a star-shaped type of glial cell. Within a year, the mouse glial cells had been completely usurped by the human interlopers. The 300,000 human cells each mouse received multiplied until they numbered 12 million, displacing the native cells.

A battery of standard tests for mouse memory and cognition showed that the mice with human astrocytes are much smarter than their mousy peers, New Scientist’ reported. — PTI