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GLIAL CELLS

Two-faced behavior of microglia in Alzheimer’s disease

Nature Neuroscience volume 25, pages 3–4 (2022)Cite this article

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Microglia form barriers that attenuate the propagation of amyloid pathology in Alzheimer’s disease. d’Errico et al. have uncovered a paradoxical ability of microglia to spread amyloid plaques, which depends on the transcription factor IRF8. Here, we highlight the contexts in which this may happen and discuss outstanding questions.

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Fig. 1: An integrated model of the contribution of microglia, astrocytes and neurons to Aβ propagation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Pathology and Immunology, Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis, St Louis, MO, USA

    Yun Chen & Marco Colonna

  2. Department of Neurology, Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis, St Louis, MO, USA

    Yun Chen

Authors
  1. Yun Chen
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  2. Marco Colonna
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Correspondence to Marco Colonna.

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Competing interests

M.C. is a member of the scientific advisory board of Vigil, and receives research support from Pfizer and Ono. The authors declare no competing interests. Y.C. declares no competing interests.

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Chen, Y., Colonna, M. Two-faced behavior of microglia in Alzheimer’s disease. Nat Neurosci 25, 3–4 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-021-00963-w

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