Besides patrolling the brain for tissue damage and other emergencies, microglia also help with routine maintenance, according to new research in the December 19 Cell. In adult mice engineered to lose microglia on demand, Wenbiao Gan, New York University School of Medicine, New York, and colleagues showed that the brain-resident immune cells facilitate synaptic plasticity. Mice lacking microglia performed poorly on several learning tasks. What’s more, ridding microglia of a single molecule—brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF)—largely recapitulated the effects of depleting the brain phagocytes altogether.
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