More excitingly this highlights that astrocyte reactivity is specialized to the local cellular niche. If you think this is cool the @JoshuaBurda lab is looking for postdocs to come and explore how other astrocyte states may regulate distinct aspects of neural regeneration 8/end

Ultimately astrocyte CCN1 seems to coordinate the microglia response to white matter damage across a variety of disorders and injuries to regulate debris clearance and repair. 7/n

We found that #myelin debris induced astrocyte CCN1. Astrocyte CCN1 is an evolutionarily conserved feature of white matter damage and is found in other modules of demyelination including lysolecithin, EAE (thx Meares lab), human MS (thx Dutta lab) and human SCI. 6/n

With help from the Choppra lab we found that WDMs from injured CCN1cKO mice have altered #lipid metabolism with reduced lipid droplet formation and increased #cholesterol efflux. Ultimately failure to regulate WDM lipid #metabolism resulted in attenuated neural regeneration 5/n

When we knocked out astrocyte CCN1 the number of the injured white matter #microglia (WDMs) increased, appeared earlier and were spatially aberrant. These WDMs had increased internalized myelin and axon debris but failed to efficiently clear extracellular debris 4/n

We found 11 spatially and transcriptomicaly distinct astrocyte clusters. Focusing on clusters WM3/4 located in the injured white matter, we predicted an interaction with a neighboring microglia population that was mediated through astrocyte CCN1 3/n

After spinal cord injury (#SCI) the spared tissue above and below the injury site exhibits incredible neural plasticity. But we didn't know what #astrocytes were up to in this area, so we performed matched single nuceli and spatial transcriptomics. 2/n

Thanks! Glad you like it!

My first foray into the world of glia was investigating the enteric glia within the #mucosa of the #intestine and we discovered that there proliferation is dependent on the gut microbiota
www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

While in the Pachnis lab we also investigated the progenitor potential of #neural #crest cells that enter the ENS and found there was a lineage related spatial relationships of the mature enteric nervous system
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28522527/

Before I moved up to the spinal cord I investigated neural progenitor potential of enteric glia with the #enteric nervous system of the #zebrafish elifesciences.org/articles/56086

Most recently as part of the Burda lab we looked into the transcriptional regulation that drives diverse astrocyte reactivity states
www.nature.com/articles/s41...