Article abstract

Nature Neuroscience 11, 450 - 456 (2008)
Published online: 2 March 2008 | Corrected online: 21 May 2008 | doi:10.1038/nn2060



There is a Corrigendum (July 2008) associated with this Article.

Spiking and nonspiking classes of oligodendrocyte precursor glia in CNS white matter

Ragnhildur Káradóttir1,2, Nicola B Hamilton1, Yamina Bakiri1 & David Attwell1

A defining feature of glial cells has been their inability to generate action potentials. We show here that there are two distinct types of morphologically identical oligodendrocyte precursor glial cells (OPCs) in situ in rat CNS white matter. One type expresses voltage-gated sodium and potassium channels, generates action potentials when depolarized and senses its environment by receiving excitatory and inhibitory synaptic input from axons. The other type lacks action potentials and synaptic input. We found that when OPCs suffered glutamate-mediated damage, as occurs in cerebral palsy, stroke and spinal cord injury, the action potential–generating OPCs were preferentially damaged, as they expressed more glutamate receptors, and received increased spontaneous glutamatergic synaptic input in ischemia. These data challenge the idea that only neurons generate action potentials in the CNS and imply that the development of therapies for demyelinating disorders will require defining which OPC type can carry out remyelination.

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  1. Department of Physiology, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, UK.
  2. Present address: Department of Veterinary Medicine, University of Cambridge, Madingley Road, Cambridge CB3 0ES, UK.

Correspondence to: Ragnhildur Káradóttir1,2 e-mail: rk385@cam.ac.uk

* In the version of this article initially published, the units for the values reported for resistance in Figure 2i,j were incorrect. The correct unit should be gigaohms. In addition, the authors did not state that the cell death experiments in Figure 6e,f were carried out using a physiological extracellular magnesium concentration of 1 mM. This error has been corrected in the HTML and PDF versions of the article.

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