Apoptotic signaling proteins as the factors control neural differentiation

A signaling proteins play the critical role during development of CNS. These proteins mainly control the size of developing neuronal populations. However, accumulating data demonstrated that apoptosis-related proteins participate in the regulation of ESC differentiation. For example, cell death-relevant proteins are functionally involved in differentiation of a wide range of cell types. We analyzed development of hypothalamus nuclei in Bcl-2 and p53 knockout mice. Obtained data demonstrated that Bcl-2 and p53 deficienciesaffected not only on the functional activity of neuroendocrine cells of hypothalamus, but also differentially changed the cell’s populations. These observation let us supposed that apoptosis-relevant proteins may participate in the regulation of differentiation of neuroendocrine cells of hypothalamus or to be involved in proliferation and/or differentiation of neural progenitor cells (NPC). We have studied differentiation/proliferation of neural progenitorsisolated from hippocampus of new-born mice. Inhibition of Bcl-2 with HA14-1 during differentiation initiated glia formation, while pifithrinalpha treatments (inhibitor of p53 activity) led to inhibition of neural differentiation but upregulated of NPC self-renewal. Thus, our data demonstrated that apoptosis signaling proteins may regulate the mechanisms of NPC differentiation.This work was supported by grants from Russian Foundation for Fundamental Research (RFBR 10-04-00127-a, and RFBR 11-04-00648-a)