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

近年来对小胶质细胞的认识进展表明，小胶质细胞在神经系统疾病的发生和传播中起着重要作用，并被招募到大脑的病变中。这些聚集的小胶质细胞对中枢神经系统的损伤有什么作用？包括我们在内的以前的报告已经表明，有两种不同的小胶质细胞，一种是神经保护作用，另一种是神经毒性作用。然而，目前两种不同表型小胶质细胞的分子机制仍有待阐明。在本研究中，我们试图从神经糖生物学的角度对这些细胞进行表征，发现中性鞘糖脂的含量有明显的差异。这些中性鞘糖脂含量的差异似乎决定了它们的生物学和免疫学特性。

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.