Oligodendrocytes
purepedantry | March 6, 2007I posted a couple months ago about neuron to glia (in this case oligodendrocyte) synapses in the hippocampus, and how researchers had shown that these synapses were capable of LTP. This was an example of two themes 1) the brain is a tricky business -- particularly with respect to information processing and 2) glia are much more important than we thought they would be.
Here is another set of articles in that vein. Publishing independently in Nature Neuroscience, Kukley et al. and Ziskin et al. has shown that there are neuron to glia synapses in the corpus callosum AND that these synapses…
purepedantry | December 5, 2006Scienceblogs welcomes OmniBrain, a neuroscience blog that I am quite fond of.
I am particularly fond of this cartoon, which has to be the funniest one ever made about oligodendrocytes. Granted that is a small group, but still...a very good comic.
purepedantry | November 24, 2006If you remember back from when I was at the Society for Neuroscience, I saw a talk by Bruce Appel where he showed videos of oligodendrocytes migrating and myelinating in the zebrafish.
Oligodendrocytes are the myelin forming cell in the central nervous system of vertebrates -- the cells that coat axons in a sheet of fat called myelin that helps the axons conduct action potentials more quickly. At a point in oligodendrocyte development the oligodendrocyte precursor cells (OPCs) have to migrate out from the ventral part of the spine to cover the axons in the spinal cord. However, this…
purepedantry | August 21, 2006OK, so I am not actually on this paper, but my boss is. It is also what I am doing my thesis on, so I thought I might mention it.
The article is entitled "Convergent evidence that oligodendrocyte lineage transcription factor 2 (OLIG2) and interacting genes influence susceptibility to schizophrenia" and was published in the August 4th issue of PNAS.
For many years all the work on schizophrenia focused on the dopamine system -- I think this is largely because dopamine-affecting drugs are used to treat it. There was also a great deal of interest in other transmitters such as glutamate, in part…
purepedantry | July 31, 2006This is huge. Jackson et al. have identified that the adult stem cell in the human brain for both neurons and oligodendrocytes are the PDGFR-alpha expressing cells and that PDGF-AA causes proliferation of these cells and a shift towards the oligodendrocyte lineage.
A little background. There is this place in the brain called the subventricular zone (SVZ) which is shockingly enough just below the lateral ventricles. This area contains rapidly dividing cells that during development grow outward to populate the cortices. These cells first form radial glia, then most of the glutamatergic…
purepedantry | July 19, 2006Now I study oligodendrocyte development, and if you ask me they are a truly unappreciated cell type. Here is yet one more piece of evidence: synapses have been detected between neurons and oligodendrocytes in CA1 of the hippocampus AND these synapses can undergo a kind of LTP.
Glial cells in the central nervous system (CNS) constitute a heterogeneous population of cell types. Macroglia-like NG2 cells express the chondriotin sulfate proteoglycan NG2 and have been described as oligodendrocyte precursor cells (OPCs) or given other names. NG2 cells in the CA1 area of the hippocampus receive…