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Researchers at the University of Virginia Medical School have discovered that microglia, specialized immune cells of the brain, play a key role in eliminating dead material after brain injury. The study, which will be published on June 25 in the Journal of Experimental Medicine, reveals that microglia engulfs the remains of injured neurons, which could prevent damage from spreading to neighboring neurons and causing greater neurodegeneration.
In every tissue of the body, dead and dying cells must be quickly removed to prevent the development of inflammation that could trigger the death of neighboring cells. This removal is performed by specialized cells that engulf and break down cellular debris, otherwise known as phagocytic cells. But scientists still need to determine which cells are responsible for eliminating neuronal debris when the brain or spinal cord is damaged.
Jonathan Kipnis, chairman of the neuroscience department of the UVA, and his colleagues examined lesions of the optic nerve of mice, which cause the degeneration of ganglion neurons in the retina and leave debris in a distant region of the brain. The researchers found that this debris is engulfed by microglia.
Microglia, which are permanently resident in the central nervous system, are a type of phagocytic cell that can engulf bacteria and other pathogens that have infected the brain. They also play an important role in the developing brain, pruning neuronal synapses that have not been able to become fully active.
In adult brains, microglia appear to recognize degenerative neurons by using some of the same molecules that they use to recognize inactive synapses or invading pathogens. Kipnis and colleagues have found that microglia produce "complementary" proteins after optic nerve injury that help phagocytic cells identify their targets.
The researchers studied what happened after an optic nerve injury in mice when microglia did not produce "complementary" proteins and found that microglia did not clean debris.
"In the future, we hope to further identify how microglia are activated in response to neurodegeneration and how they then remove neuronal debris," says Kipnis, director of the Center for Immunology of the UVA and Glia Brain. (BIG). "Knowing these mechanisms could allow us to increase the elimination of potentially toxic debris by microglia and limit the spread of neurodegeneration following brain or spinal cord injury."
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