Methylation profile of microglia in the human brain

This research was published in "Biological Psychiatry" published by Elsevier

Microglia, the brain's own immune cells, were once considered to be a homogeneous population, either "activated" or "inactivated", with pro-inflammatory or neuroprotective effects

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DNA methylation is the main form of epigenetic regulation, which determines the mode of genes being turned on or off over time in different environments

Researchers isolated microglia from the post-mortem brain tissues of 22 donors of different ages, including 1 patient with schizophrenia, 13 patients with mood disorders, and 8 people with no mental disorders extracted from 4 brain regions Control group

Unsurprisingly, microglia display DNA methylation characteristics that differ from other cells in the central nervous system

John Krystal, MD and editor of Biopsychiatry, said of this work: "These promising data show that in the biology of depression, the key immune cells of the brain-the pathology of microglia

Journal Reference :

1. Lot D.