In studies with mice that develop the equivalent of Alzheimer’s disease, Johns Hopkins researchers have shown that brain cells’ signals confuse the movement of implanted neuronal stem cells.

The observation reinforces the idea that disease can create “microenvironments” that affect the behavior of cells.

“In normal adult mice, stem cells taken from the olfactory bulb returned to the olfactory bulb — where they belong — even though they had come from a different mouse,” says Lee Martin, Ph.D., associate professor of pathology and neuroscience at Hopkins. “In mice with Alzheimer’s disease, the stem cells went all over the place within the brain, responding to a multitude of signals whose identities we don’t even know.”

Johns Hopkins Medicine news release