'Microglia regulates cognitive adaptation: the role of the nuclear GAPDH cascade'

Human beings operate under constantly changing environments and complex social systems, which requires an adaptive and flexible behavior. Specifically, behavioral flexibility is the cognitive construct that allows us to change perspectives and adapt to new and different circumstances. This behavior is affected under stress conditions, and its disturbance have been involved in many neuropsychiatric diseases, such as schizophrenia and Alzheimer?s disease. It is well established that the prefrontal cortex plays a main role in the regulation of this behavioral construct; nonetheless, cellular and molecular substrates for this behavior have not been fully clarified yet.

Therefore, we hypothesized that the dysregulation of homeostatic mechanisms in the brain performed by microglia at cellular level, and GAPDH at molecular level, could lead to deficits in behavioral flexibility.

In this work, we have demonstrated that microglial GAPDH regulates flexible behavior in inflammatory conditions, and have proposed the microglia-neural interaction responsible for this impairment. Furthermore, we propose a molecular based biomarker for deficits in behavioral flexibility in the clinic.

About

Adriana Ramos is a biochemist graduate from the University of Santiago de Compostela. She finished her PhD in Molecular Medicine in 2013, under the direction of Dr. Jesus R. Requena, investigating the pathophysiological mechanisms regulated by Disrupted in Schizophrenia 1 (DISC1), a protein involved in mental disease. Following this, she moved toers John Hopkins University (Baltimore, USA) to join the laboratory of Prof. Akira Sawa as a postdoctoral researcher, where she is currently performing her research. She is now focusing in describing the metabolic regulation of microglia cells in health and disease, and how microglia can be involved in regulating cognitive function