In collaboration with Dr. Arnold Kriegstein’s lab at UCSF, we identified that Leukemia Inhibitory Factor (LIF) signaling regulates a population of neural stem cells, called outer radial glia, in the developing cerebral cortex. We discovered that outer radial glial cells, which conically develop into excitatory neurons, can surprisingly also produce inhibitory interneurons. This finding has implications for our understanding of excitatory and inhibitory activity balance in the human brain.
