Topic
The resident immune cells of the brain and spinal cord, which clear debris and maintain surrounding tissue.
Cleveland Clinic researchers report that deleting or disabling microglial MyD88 prevented alcohol-driven extracellular matrix breakdown in the brain. Human post-mortem frontal cortex showed the same matrix loss; no human MyD88 test is described.
Reality
Oxford researchers report human microglia nibble alpha-synuclein clumps off living dopamine neurons in stem-cell cultures, a process that needs GPNMB. A gene flagged by genome-wide studies now has a testable role in the brain's immune cells, though so far only in a dish.
Reality
University of Birmingham researchers report in Brain that blocking the P2X7 receptor halted inflammatory cytokine release in living human brain slices. That makes existing P2X7 drugs fair candidates for brain-disease trials, though the evidence so far comes from tissue kept alive outside the body.
Perspective Coverage
3 publishersReality
Standard gene models leave out short open reading frames, so a Salk team built a search database that includes them and pointed it at existing proteomics data from postmortem frontal cortex samples.
Reality
A Science paper reads gene regulation cell by cell in the human hippocampus and finds embryonic microglia giving way to cells with blood-like inflammatory signatures across a 25-year band of adult life.
Reality