Emerging roles of astrocytes in neural circuit development

By L. Clarke, B. Barres. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2013

919 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Astrocytes are now emerging as key participants in many aspects of brain development, function and disease. In particular, new evidence shows that astrocytes powerfully control the formation, maturation, function and elimination of synapses through various secreted and contact-mediated signals. Astrocytes are also increasingly being implicated in the pathophysiology of many psychiatric and neurological disorders that result from synaptic defects. A better understanding of how astrocytes regulate neural circuit development and function in the healthy and diseased brain might lead to the development of therapeutic agents to treat these diseases.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Developmental Neuroscience, Neurology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/de5355c5704ffa1191ec2bd68f66a20d7f4c6863

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In Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience

In Developmental Neuroscience

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Citations in the corpus

The Cellular and Molecular Landscapes of the Developing Human Central Nervous System (2016, positive): “…differentiate during the first 3 postnatal years (Kang et al., 2011; Sanai et al., 2011; Sigaard et al., 2014), which coincides with the peak in synaptic density (Huttenlocher, 1979) and is consistent with its previously reported role in synaptic formation and elimination (Clarke and Barres, 2013).”
A role for correlated spontaneous activity in the assembly of neural circuits (2013, positive): “Recent studies have implicated activity-dependent activation of immune molecules (reviewed in Boulanger, 2009) as well as signals derived from microglia (Schafer et al., 2012) and astrocytes (reviewed in Clarke and Barres, 2013) as perhaps being key to this process.”
Purification and characterization of progenitor and mature human astrocytes reveals transcriptional and functional differences with mouse (2015, positive): “They obtained transcriptome profiles of purified human CNS cell types and discovered two distinct stages of human astrocyte development.”
Astrocyte roles in traumatic brain injury (2015, background): “Reactive astrocytes regulate injury-induced synapse remodeling A recent series of ground breaking studies from the Barres lab shows that in the developing CNS, astrocytes serve multiple essential roles in the formation of functional synapses (Clarke and Barres, 2013).”
A blood–brain barrier overview on structure, function, impairment, and biomarkers of integrity (2020, background): “Astrocytes participate in the dynamic regulations of the neural system and play a vital role in CNS inflammation in neurodegenerative diseases [58].”