Posted on 03/06/2013 5:27:33 PM PST by neverdem
Microglia eat neural stem cells in developing rat and monkey brains
Zombies aren’t the only things that feast on brains. Immune cells called microglia gorge on neural stem cells in developing rat and monkey brains, researchers report in the Mar. 6 Journal of Neuroscience.
Chewing up neuron-spawning stem cells could help control brain size by pruning away excess growth. Scientists have previously linked abnormal human brain size to autism and schizophrenia.
“It shows microglia are very important in the developing brain,” says neuroscientist Joseph Mathew Antony of the University of Toronto, who was not involved in the research.
Scientists have long known that in adult brains, microglia hunt for injured cells as well as pathogens. “They mop up all the dead and dying cells,” Antony says.
And when the scavengers find a dangerous intruder, they pounce. “These guys are relentless,” says study coauthor Stephen Noctor, of the University of California, Davis MIND Institute in Sacramento. “They seek and destroy bacteria — it’s really quite amazing.”
Microglia also lurk in embryonic brains, but the immune cells’ role there is less well understood.
Previous studies had found microglia near neural stem cells — tiny factories that pump out new neurons. When Noctor’s team examined slices of embryonic human, monkey and rodent brains, he was struck by just how many microglia crowded around the stem cells and how closely the two cell types touched.
Given the cells’ cozy contact, he figured that the microglia and the neural stem cells must interact.
Noctor and colleagues injected embryonic rat brains with a compound to make their neural stem cells glow red...
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencenews.org ...
Neurogenesis must be properly regulated to ensure that cell production does not exceed the requirements of the growing cerebral cortex, yet our understanding of mechanisms that restrain neuron production remains incomplete. We investigated the function of microglial cells in the developing cerebral cortex of prenatal and postnatal macaques and rats and show that microglia limit the production of cortical neurons by phagocytosing neural precursor cells. We show that microglia selectively colonize the cortical proliferative zones and phagocytose neural precursor cells as neurogenesis nears completion. We found that deactivating microglia in utero with tetracyclines or eliminating microglia from the fetal cerebral cortex with liposomal clodronate significantly increased the number of neural precursor cells, while activating microglia in utero through maternal immune activation significantly decreased the number of neural precursor cells. These data demonstrate that microglia play a fundamental role in regulating the size of the precursor cell pool in the developing cerebral cortex, expanding our understanding of the mechanisms that regulate cortical development. Furthermore, our data suggest that any factor that alters the number or activation state of microglia in utero can profoundly affect neural development and affect behavioral outcomes.So I entered tetracycline and innate immune system into PubMed. There were 16 citations. Tetracycline and microglia got 255 citations.
Immune cells = Zombies ?
Personally, any “Science” that comes from UCDavis is usually bought and paid for, can;t prove it JMHO.
Our science community is so corrupted by money and preset conclusions for these studies that I don’t believe anything anymore. That’s just me.
When I find complete, original articles, I'll write FReebie after the link. Sources of funding and possible conflicts of interest are routinely disclosed, or there could be hell to pay with respect to professional careers.
next experiment - to see if rat libtard brains’ size is reduced by these types of immune cells.
For the past few days it feels like something has been compressing my brain and might as well chow down on it. This is nothing like typical headaches and rare migraines. Last night it was bad enough for me who avoids hospitals to get checked out.
I got to an ER, was cat scanned and MRI-ed and both came back clean. My head still feels about the same with the same other problems such as my head feeling like it weighs 100 pounds, slobber a little, a little slurred speech, and some bobbing/nodding of my head. The quacks gave me a couple of prescriptions for pain or whatever and they do precisely nothing.
For the past few days it feels like something has been compressing my brain and might as well chow down on it. This is nothing like typical headaches and rare migraines. Last night it was bad enough for me who avoids hospitals to get checked out.
I got to an ER, was cat scanned and MRI-ed and both came back clean. My head still feels about the same with the same other problems such as my head feeling like it weighs 100 pounds, slobber a little, a little slurred speech, and some bobbing/nodding of my head. The quacks gave me a couple of prescriptions for pain or whatever and they do precisely nothing.
For the past few days it feels like something has been compressing my brain and might as well chow down on it. This is nothing like typical headaches and rare migraines. Last night it was bad enough for me who avoids hospitals to get checked out.
I got to an ER, was cat scanned and MRI-ed and both came back clean. My head still feels about the same with the same other problems such as my head feeling like it weighs 100 pounds, slobber a little, a little slurred speech, and some bobbing/nodding of my head. The quacks gave me a couple of prescriptions for pain or whatever and they do precisely nothing.
Interesting.
I can’t access the complete article without a subscription.
I earned my PhD at UC Davis, and consider myself extremely fortunate to have been accepted as a student there. UC Davis is one of the top research universities in the world.
What do you mean, "bought and paid for"? My funding came from a variety of sources: National Institutes of Environmental Health, Superfund, California Agricultural Research Station, some private fellowships from individual donors and biotech companies. In no case was I ever told that I needed to produce certain results or lose funding. Scientists cannot produce specific results on demand--science doesn't work that way.
Your funding says everything to me, no offense, the first three have no agenda?
We all start with a premise, a theorem, a question and then go on to to do the five steps. Just sayin’. Sorry you don’t like what I am speculating on, but I feel strongly about this, CA in the seventies was a hotbed of environmental b/s.
My funding says that I chose a particular type of research, and those agencies fund that kind of research. If I had wanted to do a different kind of research, I would have been funded by other agencies. The funding agencies only care that you are productive. Well, and that you spend the money they give you for the purposes you said you want it for. *No* funding source can tell a scientist that they will produce certain results--because that cannot be done. It's like the story of Rumpelstiltskin, where the girl is told to spin straw into gold or be executed--she had the strongest motive in the world to make gold, but she still couldn't do it because it was physically impossible.
Also, funding agencies do not go find scientists and tell them what to work on and what kinds of results to produce. Rather, scientists decide what they want to research, and then identify sources who will fund their research.
I pray that your fellow scientists have as much integrity as you have.
I am not confident in that prayer, sad to say.
I am not confident in that prayer, sad to say.
I was not talking about fraud in science, which unfortunately does happen. That is the area where integrity is important. We in the scientific community take fraud very seriously, and try to stamp it out when it occurs. It reflects badly on all of us.
If it makes you feel better, leftist kooks are not drawn to science. For them, it's like garlic to a vampire: the rigor of the scientific process and the constraint of stating only what can be demonstrated and reliably repeated by other members of the scientific community goes against their nature. They hate things that are rooted in concrete objective reality.
I should point out that there are many quacks on the web who spout sciency-sounding gibberish (usually because they want your money). But if you find a report such as the article that started this thread, that describes actual experimental data using sound methodology and is referenced back to PubMed, you can be confident that it's not quackery. When I find less than reliable "science" posted on FreeRepublic, I ruthlessly criticize it.
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