For fly, the total human genes conserved is 57.9% and
Human rare disease genes conserved is 73.1%!
🪰👤

But not only that, this glia-to-neuron transformation is boosted in injury!
These findings open a new approach to generate new neurons in a damaged CNS. Understanding the molecular mechanism behind this physiological glial behaviour would have and immeasurable value

With these experiments we find out that around 6-8% of EG switch to ALG fate in normal and injury conditions while ALG to EG switch is rare. But what definitely blew our minds was that both ALG and EG were able to change their glial fate to become neurons

But when we inhibit apoptosis we still have some cells missing. So we decided to find out if those missing cells had changed their identity. Using the wonderful tool G-TRACE,we were able to follow those cells even though they did not have their identity promoter activated

Although both EG and ALG have a basal proliferation rate, only ALG increases proliferation in response to injury.
By exploring this process we observed that sometimes one of the sibling cells died through apoptosis...

To study glial responses we use an injury paradigm that reproduces the stereotypical glial responses previously described in numerous organisms and CNS injury paradigms.
1st we confirmed glial proliferation upon injury in adults. Moreover, we found that...

In the Drosophila CNS there are two types of neuropil associated glia. Astrocyte-like glia (ALG) and Ensheathing glia (EG). These two populations are equivalent to vertebrate astrocytes, oligodendrocytes and OPCs...