Bosch Lance Fredrick Pahutan, Kierdorf Katrin
Institute of Neuropathology, Faculty of Medicine, University of Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany.
Faculty of Biology, University of Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany.
Front Cell Neurosci. 2022 Jun 29;16:942462. doi: 10.3389/fncel.2022.942462. eCollection 2022.
Microglia, the innate immune cells of the CNS parenchyma, serve as the first line of defense in a myriad of neurodevelopmental, neurodegenerative, and neuroinflammatory conditions. In response to the peripheral inflammation, circulating mediators, and other external signals that are produced by these conditions, microglia dynamically employ different transcriptional programs as well as morphological adaptations to maintain homeostasis. To understand these cells' function, the field has established a number of essential analysis approaches, such as gene expression, cell quantification, and morphological reconstruction. Although high-throughput approaches are becoming commonplace in regard to other types of analyses (e.g., single-cell scRNA-seq), a similar standard for morphological reconstruction has yet to be established. In this review, we offer an overview of microglial morphological analysis methods, exploring the advantages and disadvantages of each, highlighting a number of key studies, and emphasizing how morphological analysis has significantly contributed to our understanding of microglial function in the CNS parenchyma. In doing so, we advocate for the use of unbiased, automated morphological reconstruction approaches in future studies, in order to capitalize on the valuable information embedded in the cellular structures microglia inhabit.
小胶质细胞是中枢神经系统实质中的固有免疫细胞，在众多神经发育、神经退行性和神经炎症性疾病中充当第一道防线。针对这些疾病产生的外周炎症、循环介质和其他外部信号，小胶质细胞动态地采用不同的转录程序以及形态适应来维持体内平衡。为了了解这些细胞的功能，该领域已经建立了许多重要的分析方法，如基因表达、细胞定量和形态重建。尽管高通量方法在其他类型的分析（如单细胞scRNA-seq）中变得越来越普遍，但形态重建的类似标准尚未建立。在这篇综述中，我们概述了小胶质细胞形态分析方法，探讨了每种方法的优缺点，突出了一些关键研究，并强调了形态分析如何显著促进了我们对中枢神经系统实质中小胶质细胞功能的理解。在此过程中，我们提倡在未来的研究中使用无偏倚的、自动化的形态重建方法，以便利用小胶质细胞所占据的细胞结构中嵌入的宝贵信息。
