“Loss of synapses and dysfunctional synapses in a region-specific way is important in Alzheimer’s. It’s actually the strongest correlate of cognitive decline, far more so than plaques and tangles, which are the pathological hallmarks,” Soyon Hong told the audience at the XVII Meeting on Glial Cells in Health and Disease, which was held in Marseille last week.
The Annual Congress of the European Committee for Treatment and Research in Multiple Sclerosis (ECTRIMS) meeting in Copenhagen this week is celebrating its 40th edition. In recognition of this landmark, the plenary session and opening lecture were attended by Queen Margrethe of Denmark. Afterward, the hot topic session on neuroprotective therapies set the stage for the subsequent discussions on the latest trends in the management and treatment of multiple sclerosis (MS).
Researchers at Kanazawa University, Japan, have reported a mixed-glial culture on/in soft substrate (MGS) platform to investigate cancer-glia interactions in vitro. Using this model, they showed that astrocytes favored brain metastasis by promoting metabotropic glutamate mGlu1 receptor (mGluR1) expression in cancer cells and stabilizing EGFR. Eishu Hirata, an associate professor at the Cancer Research Institute, Division of Tumor Cell Biology and Bioimaging at Kanazawa University, and his team
published their work on Feb. 2, 2024, in Developmental Cell.
A receptor could hold the key to explaining how stress affects behavior, at least under certain circumstances. Scientists from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) have described how childhood neglect or abuse altered the brain. Stress glucocorticoid hormones caused neuronal damage in mice by increasing the receptor tyrosine kinase MERTK in astrocytes and inducing them to phagocytose excitatory synapses.
Transplanted human glial cells could outcompete human glia in a chimeric mouse model of Huntington’s disease, inducing apoptosis. And younger health cells could outcompete older ones. The findings, which appeared online in Nature Biotechnology on July 17, 2023, help pave the way for testing glial cell transplantation as a therapeutic strategy in neurodegenerative disorders.
In brain research, be it basic or clinical, neurons have long hogged the limelight. But at the 2023 European Meeting on Glial Cells in Health and Disease, neurons take a back seat to glia – cell types that have often been described as support cells and treated as an afterthought, but that play critical roles in all aspects of brain function, including information processing.
The analysis of thousands of proteins in the brain has revealed the association of astrocytes with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). A proteomic study by researchers from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) has identified them in different cellular compartments of astrocytes and neurons. One such protein, the postsynaptic protein SAPAP3, appeared to regulate the organization of the actin cytoskeleton. Its deficit in astrocytes could cause OCD.
Major depressive disorder (MDD) was linked to impaired neural connectivity caused by astrocyte dysfunction, according to a study from the Southern Medical University in Guangzhou in collaboration with the University of Hong Kong.
Brain plasticity has been postulated to be mainly mediated by neurons. Now, investigators led by Nathalie Rouach at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Biology, College De France have demonstrated the role of astrocytes in mediating brain plasticity.
