Elucidation of the role of microglia in the pathogenesis of neurological disorders.

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Recent advances on the understanding of microglia have revealed that microglia plays important roles on the development and propagation of neurological disorders, which are recruited to the lesions of the brain. What are these recruited microglia doing on the lesions of central nervous system? Previous reports including ours have demonstrated that there are two different microglia, one is acting as neuroprotective roles and other as neurotoxic roles on neurons. At present, however, the molecular mechanisms for two different phenotypes of microglia remain to be elucidated. In this study, we tried to characterize these cells from the neuro-glycobiological point of view and found that there is an obvious difference of the contents of neutral glycosphingolipids. These differences of neutral glycosphingolipid contents seem to determine their biological and immunological property.