Captured on Film for the First Time: Microglia nibbling on brain synapses

Around one in ten cells in your brain are microglia. Cousins of macrophages, they act as the first and main contact in the central nervous system’s active immune defense. They also guide healthy brain development. Researchers have proposed that microglia pluck off and eat synapses - connections between brain cells - as an essential step in the pruning of connections during early circuit refinement. But, until now, no one had seen them do it.

Microglia make synapses stronger

That is why Laetitia Weinhard, from the Gross group at EMBL Rome, set out on a massive imaging study to actually see this process in action in the mouse brain, in collaboration with the Schwab team at EMBL Heidelberg. “Our findings suggest that microglia are nibbling synapses as a way to make them stronger, rather than weaker,” says Cornelius Gross, who led the work.

Warm welcome

The team saw that around half of the time that microglia contact a synapse, the synapse head sends out thin projections or ‘filopodia’ to greet them. In one particularly dramatic case – as seen in the accompanying image – fifteen synapse heads extended filopodia toward a single microglia as it picked on a synapse. “As we were trying to see how microglia eliminate synapses, we realised that microglia actually induce their growth most of the time,” Laetitia Weinhard explains.

It turns out that microglia might underly the formation of double synapses, where the terminal end of a neuron releases neurotransmitters onto two neighboring partners instead of one. This process can support effective connectivity between neurons. Weinhard: “This shows that microglia are broadly involved in structural plasticity and might induce the rearrangement of synapses, a mechanism underlying learning and memory.”