Microglia Function in the Central Nervous System During Health and Neurodegeneration
By M. Colonna, O. Butovsky. Annual Review of Immunology, 2017
2,422 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Microglia are resident cells of the brain that regulate brain development, maintenance of neuronal networks, and injury repair. Microglia serve as brain macrophages but are distinct from other tissue macrophages owing to their unique homeostatic phenotype and tight regulation by the central nervous system (CNS) microenvironment. They are responsible for the elimination of microbes, dead cells, redundant synapses, protein aggregates, and other particulate and soluble antigens that may endanger the CNS. Furthermore, as the primary source of proinflammatory cytokines, microglia are pivotal mediators of neuroinflammation and can induce or modulate a broad spectrum of cellular responses. Alterations in microglia functionality are implicated in brain development and aging, as well as in neurodegeneration. Recent observations about microglia ontogeny combined with extensive gene expression profiling and novel tools to study microglia biology have allowed us to characterize the spectrum of microglial phenotypes during development, homeostasis, and disease. In this article, we review recent advances in our understanding of the biology of microglia, their contribution to homeostasis, and their involvement in neurodegeneration. Moreover, we highlight the complexity of targeting microglia for therapeutic intervention in neurodegenerative diseases.
Subfields: Immunology, Neurology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b45c4a221d46372b9ba2ff0827cf6f740aa150c2
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Citations in the corpus
- Microglia in Alzheimer’s disease (2018, background): “PTK2B/Pyk2 Non–receptor tyrosine kinase; homologue of focal adhesion kinase Activated in microglia by fibrillar Aβ (Combs et al., 1999).”
- Microglia in neurodegenerative diseases: mechanism and potential therapeutic targets (2023, background): “9,10 However, this simplistic classi fi cation fails to capture the complexity of microglial responses in the context of neurodegenerative disease.”
- Alzheimer Disease: An Update on Pathobiology and Treatment Strategies (2019, positive): “Direct microglial effects on neuron viability—Activated microglia can directly secrete toxic proinflammatory cytokines (Colonna and Butovsky, 2017; Kinney et al., 2018) or secrete indirect mediators that stimulate astrocytes to secrete a neurotoxic substance (Liddelow et al.”
- Microglia Polarization From M1 to M2 in Neurodegenerative Diseases (2022, background): “Microglia play a critical role in compacting and corralling amyloid deposits, encapsulating them as a protective barrier, thus limiting accumulated potentially neurotoxic Aβ aggregates as well as shielding neurons from local toxicity (Condello et al., 2015).”
- High‐Dimensional Single‐Cell Mapping of Central Nervous System Immune Cells Reveals Distinct Myeloid Subsets in Health, Aging, and Disease (2018, positive): “…are microglia: specialized macrophages that are seeded into the brain during embryogenesis (Ginhoux et al., 2010; Schulz et al., 2012), where they contribute to neuronal synapse sculpting and immune surveillance (Colonna and Butovsky, 2017; Prinz and Priller, 2014; Salter and Beggs, 2014).”
- Developmental heterogeneity of microglia and brain myeloid cells revealed by deep single-cell RNA sequencing (2018, positive): “Microglia are brain parenchymal macrophages that are implicated in numerous neurological diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, stroke, and brain tumors (Colonna and Butovsky, 2017; Prinz et al., 2011).”