Neuron-astrocyte omnidirectional signaling in neurological health and disease – It’s kind of shocking how far we’ve come in the past 15 years, and kind of disorienting to realize there’s still no indication of how far we need to go. This is a pretty good review of that!
Differential intracellular trafficking of extracellular vesicles in microglia and astrocytes – Interesting possible wrinkle for the model, this suggests that neurons encode data to EVs before processing by astrocytes, which “nibble off” the EVs/data for processing and dissemination. Incompatible data or data which is encoded in a “harmful” manner is tagged and microglia come in and remove those. This is probably more consistent with the orthodox view of nervous system function, even if it may be limited to second order neurons.
FABP7: a glial integrator of sleep, circadian rhythms, plasticity, and metabolic function – I generally try to avoid adding work which focus on a specific protein, receptor, or chemical to dumps because they miss the point, however they do add intriguing bits and pieces to the puzzle. Work like this is generally flawed for the same reason any other knockout or lesion related work is flawed, they don’t respect the wildly divergent upstream and downstream differences in organisms. They also lack any type of genuine specificity, they don’t eliminate upstream or downstream effects of the change. The second reason is particularly important because there’s a huge bias in assuming that cascade is unidirectional, where in fact many biological processes impart bidirectional upstream and downstream effect. Compound that with the huge difference in metabotropic processes between models and we get to the core of the wild inconsistency we see with neuroscience related work. That being said, this is a very interestingly shaped puzzle piece.
Chronic inhibition of astrocytic aquaporin-4 induces autistic-like behavior in control rat offspring similar to maternal exposure to valproic acid – “Autistic” rats. Sigh. I’d love to see a paper on the validity of “Autism” diagnostic measures, this is almost an immaterialscience level of goofery. Essentially this is claiming that “autism” and dementia are the same. Although to be fair, on most of my assessments since I was a child I tend to core in the “mild cognitive impairment” range and the clinician has to go out of their way to note “No cognitive impairment”. My clocks are sloppy circles with everything in the right place, I have pretty absurd “long term” memory, but can’t remember anything from 2 minutes ago if interrupted. Guess the point is that there may be merit to the idea that “dementia” and some phenotypes of “autism” are driven by the same etiologies, but this type of work isn’t going to get us any closer to understanding the mechanisms. By the way VALPO/DEPAKOTE IS NASTY SHIT. NO ONE SHOULD BE TAKING IT.
Astrocyte endfeet may theoretically act as valves to convert pressure oscillations to glymphatic flow – This one is close enough at this scale to probably be an accurate description of mechanics. DROP THE BASS!