Research Highlight Setting a highway for converting skin into neurons

Direct conversion of human skin fibroblasts into induced neuronal (iN) cells has been recently achieved by using different combi-nations of transcription factors eventually associated with microRNAs. These findings lay the ground for a straightforward and effi-cient generation of human neurons in vitro with elaborated functional properties instrumental for disease modeling and cell-based approaches of brain repair. Six groups have independently succeeded in generating functional human neurons by direct conversion of skin fibroblasts in vitro (Ambasudhan et al., 2011; Caiazzo et al.