Glial scar brain and spinal cord. FGF2 has also been shown to increase astrocyte proliferation "in vitro". Ciliary neurotrophic factor (CNTF) is a cytosolic protein that is not secreted. CNTF has been shown to promote the survival of neuronal cultures "in vitro", and it can also act as a differentiator and trophic factor on glial cells. Further, CNTF has been previously shown to affect the differentiation of glial precursor cells "in vitro"; however, the influence of CNTF in the "in vivo" setting has only recently been determined. Winter "et al." used CNTF over-expressing transgenic mice as well as wildtype controls that had
Perisynaptic schwann cells cells of which Perisynaptic Schwann cells are a subset. Neural crest cells are found in the dorsal neural tube from which nerves and glia alike grow and Neural crest cells are the precursors to many various tissue types including enteric neurons and glia. Schwann cell precursors (a first derivative of Neural crest cells) are present as the nerve axon grows from the dorsal neural tube, but it has been shown that these glial precursors are not essential to axonal growth. The transition from neural crest cells to Schwann cell precursors is characterized by Sox10 and generally occurs around embryonic day