Abstract
Plasticity, and in particular, neurogenesis, is a promising target to treat and prevent a wide variety of diseases (e.g., epilepsy, stroke, dementia). There are different types of plasticity, which vary with age, brain region, and species. These observations stress the importance of defining plasticity along temporal and spatial dimensions. We review recent studies focused on brain plasticity across the lifespan and in different species. One main theme to emerge from this work is that plasticity declines with age but that we have yet to map these different forms of plasticity across species. As part of this effort, we discuss our recent progress aimed to identify corresponding ages across species, and how this information can be used to map temporal variation in plasticity from model systems to humans.
Highlights
Many strategies used to alleviate disease or brain damage rely on plastic features of the nervous system
Adult neurogenesis, which was highlighted as an important biological process in the 1990s, spans critical periods in select regions, and fosters the retention of immature features, though the timelines of neurogenesis are characterized by remarkable species differences [52,58,59]
These possibly occur within a neural network substantially assembled and “mature.” Second, adult neurogenesis is intended as the stem cell-driven formation of new neurons in the postnatal brain [1,14,15,61]
Summary
Many strategies used to alleviate disease or brain damage rely on plastic features of the nervous system. Mammals possess multiple forms of plasticity; examples include neuron and glial production, synaptogenesis, and post-neurogenetic maturation [1,7,11,12,13,14,15,16] These plastic features vary spatio–temporally and enable brain circuits to be sculpted based on experience [7,17,18,19,20]. We discuss past and recent progress on the translating time web resource originally developed by Dr Clancy and her collaborators [36,37,38,39] This online resource finds corresponding ages across species and can be used to assess how plasticity (e.g., neurogenesis, neuron immaturity, synaptic plasticity) has been modified between humans and model systems
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