Neurogenesis Research on the Internet

Research suggests that new neurons are produced in the hippocampus of adult laboratory animals at a high rate. It is likely that the same process occurs in human brains. If you are a young adult a new granule cell is born in your brain every 10 seconds or so. This results in thousands of new neurons per day. If you are over 50 your new cell production is probably slowing down to a trickle.

Using laboratory animals we are trying to understand the process of adult neurogenesis and the physiological and pathological factors controlling the rate of cell production. The key questions are:

1. What are the functions of new cells?
2. Is hippocampal dependent learning critically dependent on the new cell production?

We are also interested in studying neurogenesis in animals living in natural, wild environments, since they probably reflect a human population better than the lab rats.

We anticipate that, once we know the mechanisms and the roles of the adult neurogenesis in the hippocampal dentate gyrus, the inherent capacity of the dentate granule neurons to proliferate can be harnessed, or at least mimicked, to repair brain damage caused by injury or neurodegenerative disease.