The choroid plexus and cerebrospinal fluid: emerging roles in development, disease, and therapy.

Although universally recognized as the source of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), the choroid plexus (ChP) has been one of the most understudied tissues in neuroscience. The reasons for this are multiple and varied, including historical perceptions about passive and permissive roles for the ChP, experimental issues, and lack of clinical salience. However, recent work on the ChP and instructive signals in the CSF have sparked new hypotheses about how the ChP and CSF provide unexpected means for regulating nervous system structure and function in health and disease, as well as new ChP-based therapeutic approaches using pluripotent stem cell technology. This minisymposium combines new and established investigators to capture some of the newfound excitement surrounding the ChP-CSF system.