Adult Neurogenesis: Beyond Rats and Mice

Download or read book Adult Neurogenesis: Beyond Rats and Mice written by Luca Bonfanti and published by Frontiers Media SA. This book was released on 2019-02-11 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Researchers working on adult neurogenesis have focused largely on inbred laboratory rodents. While this provides a strong advantage of restricting genetic variation in the group, it also narrows our perspective on adult neurogenesis as a biological phenomenon. Many unsolved issues and open questions cannot be resolved without the contribution of comparative studies spanning through widely different species: how did adult neurogenesis evolve, what is the link between adult neurogenesis and brain complexity, how do adult neurogenesis and animal behavior influence each other, how does adult neurogenesis contribute to brain plasticity, cognition and, possibly, repair, and how do experimental conditions affect adult neurogenesis. The main message from the comparative approach to adult neurogenesis is that the relative exclusive focus on laboratory rodents can result in a bias on how we think about this biological process.