Novel Insights into Microglia Heterogeneity and Neurodegeneration
A special issue of International Journal of Molecular Sciences (ISSN 1422-0067). This special issue belongs to the section "Molecular Neurobiology".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 20 October 2025 | Viewed by 927
Special Issue Editor
Interests: inflammation; microglia; astrocytes; neurodegeneration; Parkinson's disease; neuroinflammation; immune system; brain; inflammatory bowel diseases
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Microglia, resident immune cells in the central nervous system (CNS), play various biologically important roles under homeostatic and disease conditions, such as supporting neuronal development, synaptic pruning or scavenging dying cells. Moreover, as effector cells, microglia can influence the progress of many brain diseases, including as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis and affective disorders.
A microglial phenotype, rarely present in steady-state conditions but abundant during chronic stress, aging and Alzheimer’s disease, is represented by “dark microglia”, suggesting a new phenotype involved in the pathological remodeling of neuronal circuits, especially at the synapse level. The heterogeneity of microglia in different regions of the CNS during development, homeostasis and neurological disorders has not been fully studied and little information is known about the subgroups of microglia during disease. The main reasons for this limited knowledge include important technical limitations that do not allow for an adequate spatial and temporal representation of microglia multiplicity at the single-cell level. Previous single-cell level analyses of microglia, such as flow cytometry, in situ hybridization or immunohistochemistry, were limited to probing a few selected proteins or RNAs, which clearly hindered the ability to study complete landscapes of microglial diversity.
In this Special Issue, we aim to bring together the most recent studies exploring microglial heterogeneity using new advanced technologies to understand the role of microglia heterogeneity during development, homeostasis and in neurological disorders.
Prof. Dr. Maria Anttonietta Panaro
Guest Editor
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Keywords
- microglia
- synapses
- stress
- aging
- heterogeneity
- CNS
- single-cell RNA sequencing
- neurodegenerative diseases
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