Chemokine Receptors and Neural Stem Cells

Neural stem cells (NSCs) represent a limited population of progenitor cells in the central nervous system that sustain their self-renewal and multipotency from early development to adulthood. Recent evidence suggests that chemokine receptors are constitutively expressed by NSCs and are directly involved in stem cell biology. As cell surface receptors, chemokine receptors also provide an important avenue to enrich these cells and further identify the potential molecular pathways required to maintain their biological functions. Here, I describe in vitro methods that have been widely applied to sort, culture, maintain, and differentiate NSCs.