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Brain inflammatory cascade controlled by gut-derived molecules

Metabolite molecules produced by the gut’s microbes activate immune cells in the brain called microglia, which signal to astrocyte cells to mediate responses to inflammation in the central nervous system.
  1. Hartmut Wekerle

    1. Hartmut Wekerle is at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology, D-82152 Martinsried, Germany.

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Some immunologists regard the central nervous system (CNS) as a no-man’s-land, avoided by immune cells and therefore uninteresting. But, in fact, the CNS has a vigorous immune potential that remains dormant in normal conditions but is awakened after injury. The switch that controls the brain’s immune microenvironment involves non-neuronal cells called glia — not only microglia, which are sometimes called the immune cells of the CNS, but also multifunctional cells called astrocytes1. In a paper in Nature, Rothhammer et al.2 describe how these two glial cell types communicate on a molecular level to influence inflammation in the CNS, and show that this interaction is controlled remotely by microbes that inhabit the gut.

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Nature 557, 642-643 (2018)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-05113-0

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