New human microglial marker
2015
Meiji Pharmaceutical University, Tokyo, Japan
Microglia are the resident macrophages of the central nervous system. In recent years, they have been described to have an important role in several neurological disorders. However, it is still difficult to discriminate resident microglial cells from infiltrating macrophages and this interferes with the study of human microglia. In this study, the researchers try to find a new marker that is exclusively and consistently expressed in human microglia. After a first comparative analysis in microglial transcriptome datasets, TMEM119 is identified as a candidate marker, which is found to be consistently expressed in immortalised human microglia in different conditions. This marker is also described to be a better discriminator from infiltrating macrophages that express currently used microglial markers. Finally, there were no differences in the expression of TMEM119 in different subsets of microglia and between control and diseased human brains, clarifying that this can be a reliable marker to be used to study microglia in different conditions. These results offer new possibilities to better isolate and study human microglia and show the possibility of using human models to improve the translational value of glial biology studies.
TMEM119 marks a subset of microglia in the human brain
Jun-ichi Satoh
Added on: 08-16-2021
[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/neup.12235[2] https://data.jrc.ec.europa.eu/dataset/a8fd26ef-b113-47ab-92ba-fd2be449c7eb
