Why do the brain's immune cells falter with age?

Masked physician writing in a chart while patients and caregivers look on
By Neuroscience Research Theme
1 min read

Microglia are the brains immune cells, and they help keep it healthy by clearing harmful material, but we still don't know how or why they falter with age. 

Lindsay De Biase and PhD student Adrian Escobar at David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA have developed a first-of-its-kind way to map every protein on the surface of microglia using chemically preserved human brain tissue. It even works on tissue preserved for weeks, which opens up brains stored in tissue banks around the world. 

Their work on microglia in aging and diseases like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's now has support from a W. M. Keck Foundation grant, and the method is built to be affordable for labs with fewer resources. 

Read the full release: A new approach to using tissue bank samples to study the aging brain