A Critical Period for Social Experience–Dependent Oligodendrocyte Maturation and Myelination
By M. Makinodan, K. Rosen, Susumu Ito, G. Corfas. Science, 2012
878 citations recorded by the source corpus.
A Critical Period for Glia The brain develops in fits and starts—while one system is completed, another system may still be under construction. Such transient states are known as critical periods, and during these specific aspects of brain development may become more sensitive to outside agents than they would be later. Makinodan et al. (p. 1357) observed the effect of environmental conditions on the brains of mice bioengineered to develop fluorescent oligodendrocytes. The mice were exposed to a variety of social conditions during rearing, ranging from isolation to a normal laboratory cage setting, or to settings enriched with extra buddies and a steady rotation of new play toys. The results show that social isolation leaves a developmental trace that persists into adulthood. Specifically, they found that oligodendrocytes, which produce the myelin that insulates neurons, were underdeveloped, suggesting that there may be a critical period that governs development of these glial oligodendrocyte cells. In mice, early social experience regulates prefrontal cortex myelination that is essential for normal cognitive development. Early social isolation results in adult behavioral and cognitive dysfunction that correlates with white matter alterations. However, how social deprivation influences myelination and the significance of these myelin defects in the adult remained undefined. We show that mice isolated for 2 weeks immediately after weaning have alterations in prefrontal cortex function and myelination that do not recover with reintroduction into a social environment. These alterations, which occur only during this critical period, are phenocopied by loss of oligodendrocyte ErbB3 receptors, and social isolation leads to reduced expression of the ErbB3 ligand neuregulin-1. These findings indicate that social experience regulates prefrontal cortex myelination through neuregulin-1/ErbB3 signaling and that this is essential for normal cognitive function, thus providing a cellular and molecular context to understand the consequences of social isolation.
Subfields: Developmental Neuroscience, Neurology, Social Psychology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/93b571444635872d617ef3bb5057b5414c3ace17
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Developmental Neuroscience
In Neurology
In Social Psychology
Citations in the corpus
- Oligodendrocytes: Myelination and Axonal Support. (2015, background): “…regulated by experience both during development and in adult life, thus, the extent of myelin sheath formation may also serve as a form of plasticity to adapt brain function to environmental stimuli (Fields 2008; Liu et al. 2012; Makinodan et al. 2012; Mangin et al. 2012; Young et al. 2013).”
- Oligodendrocyte Dynamics in the Healthy Adult CNS: Evidence for Myelin Remodeling (2013, background): “Recently, it has been shown that the social conditions experienced by mice can influence the morphological complexity of their OLs (including the number of internodes per OL) and that this is mediated by Neuregulin signaling through ErbB3 receptors on OLs (Makinodan et al., 2012).”
- Discriminative and affective touch: sensing and feeling. (2014, background): “A recent study by Makinodan et al. (2012) finds that mice socially isolated for a 2-week period immediately after weaning showed functional deficits in prefrontal cortex (PFC) and its degree of myelination.”