Dr Rod Rietze

Stem cells have long been described as the Holy Grail for bioscience researchers.

These amazing cells have the potential to develop into many different cell types in the body and also have the potential to revolutionise medical science.

Functioning like a repair system for the body, they can theoretically divide without limit to replenish cells lost due to everyday wear and tear, or following injury or disease.

Dr Rod Rietze, Head of the Laboratory for Neural Stem Cell Biology in the Queensland Brain Institute, is hoping those stem cells may soon unlock the secrets to healing the brain as well.

First he has to find out what they actually do – something that has been notoriously hard to discover in the past.
But an $80,000 UQ Foundation Research Excellence Award will help fund a project looking at a novel approach to track neural stem cells in vivo.

“Identifying neural stem cells is like finding a needle in a haystack,” Dr Rietze said.

“Although we were the first to identify and isolate the stem cell from the brain – a landmark paper published on the front cover of Nature in 2001 – we need to now be able to postiively identify them at work in the brain.

“The tried-and-true method is to look for particular markers on the outside of the cell, but this is a long and laborious process.

“What we are doing is looking at a distinguishing attribute of stem cells, which is that they are relatively quiescent, or don’t divide much in relation to other cells.”

• Dr Rod Rietze www.uq.edu.au/uqresearchers/researcher/rietzerl.html

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