Imagine boarding a routine rocket to Mars sometime in the distant future. Someone just spilled their drink. In zero gravity, it collects into floating blobs that undulate right before your eyes. Freeze now.
What you see might look something like the above image from the Cheadle lab at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL). But those purple and green blobs aren’t the floating remains of someone’s drink. They are mysterious cells in the visual cortex of the brain, called OPCs.
The visual cortex processes everything we see. Incoming visual information is sent to this outer layer of the brain via synapses (the silver stripes above them). When the brain’s neural circuits are first connected, more connections or synapses are created than necessary. As the brain gathers new experiences and information, OPCs form neural circuits by pruning unnecessary synapses.
OPCs do all kinds of things in the brain that allow it to function in a normal, healthy way.”
Lucas Cheadle, CSHL assistant professor
OPCs are a specialty of the Cheadle lab. He and his team discovered the function of OPCs as neural landscape architects in 2022. Previously, they were thought to produce only oligodendrocytes, cells that envelop and support neurons. Now Cheadle has developed new ways to zoom in and see OPCs in action.
“We can see what thousands of OPCs, and even smaller groups of 30 to 50, are doing,” he explains. “From there we can figure out which synapses are completely engulfed by an OPC, which are currently being pruned, and which may have just been checked by an OPC but not processed.”
The new techniques used to produce the image above have become essential tools in Cheadle’s ongoing work. He and his team are now building on their 2022 discovery to paint a complete picture of the role of OPCs in health and disease. Cheadle explains, “These mysterious cells are one of the major sources of glioma,” a deadly brain cancer. “They may also be involved in Alzheimer’s disease.”
More research is needed to illustrate these connections in detail. In the meantime, Cheadle is eager to share his lab’s new tools with researchers around the world. “The brain is constantly changing, and the same approaches you would use to look at one type of cell can’t simply be applied across the board,” he says. “We adapt and innovate to keep up – to better understand how the brain works.”
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Magazine reference:
Kahng, JA, et al. (2024). High-confidence and high-throughput quantification of synapse engulfment by oligodendrocyte progenitors. Nature protocols. doi.org/10.1038/s41596-024-01048-1.