Microglia strike again

While it's widely accepted that microglia contribute to Alzheimer's disease pathology by failing to clear β-amyloid aggregates and promoting neuroinflammation, researchers at Boston University School of Medicine have now placed the cells at the center of another major feature of the disease, the spread of microtubule-associated protein τ (tau; MAPT; FTDP-17) from neuron to neuron.

The Boston University team led by Tsuneya Ikezu, a professor in the Departments of Pharmacology & Experimental Therapeutics and Neurology, created a mouse model of the tau pathology by injecting a viral vector encoding a mutant version of tau associated with a familiar form of AD into the entorhinal cortex - a region in the mouse brain that maps to the area where tau first accumulates in patients. ...