ArticleThe Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience2020
Similar Microglial Cell Densities across Brain Structures and Mammalian Species: Implications for Brain Tissue Function.
Article in The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 62 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
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The trial behind it
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Who cites it
62 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 98 citations in OpenAlex.
- Association between FDG- and TSPO-PET signals across human and animal studies investigating neurodegenerative conditions: a systematic review.Molecular psychiatry · 2026Pooled it
- Variability by region and method in human brain sodium concentrations estimated byScientific reports · 2023Pooled it
- Human-specific SRGAP2 paralogs synchronize neotenic microglial maturation and synaptic development.Neuron · 2026Article
- Microglial maturation across human and mouse as a reference for interpreting large-animal models of perinatal brain injury.Pediatric research · 2026Review
- The Ovine Brain as a Model for Human Neurodevelopment: Immunohistochemical Profiling of Brain Maturation Markers in Preterm Lambs.The Journal of comparative neurology · 2026Article
- Luteolin-Loaded TGN/RAP12 Dual-Peptide Functionalized Nanoparticles: Synergistic Enhancement of BBB Penetration and Microglia Targeting in Alzheimer's Disease.Molecules (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Decoding Alzheimer's Disease One Cell Class at a Time.Cellular and molecular neurobiology · 2026Review
- Neonatal inflammation induces lasting sex- and region-dependent microglia activation and sex-dependent impairments in chemoreflexes.Journal of applied physiology (Bethesda, Md. : 1985) · 2026Article
- A high-throughput, quantitative platform using 2D dissociated human cerebral organoids to model neuroinflammation in Alzheimer's disease.NPJ dementia · 2026Article
- One Biology and the Status of Humans.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2025Review
- Conservation of glial density and cell-type ratios within a brain region across mammals.PNAS nexus · 2025Article
- The Energetic Collapse of the Alzheimer's Brain: Metabolic Inflexibility Across Cells and Networks.Journal of neurochemistry · 2025Review
- Modeling ALS with Patient-Derived iPSCs: Recent Advances and Future Potentials.Brain sciences · 2025Review
- Microglial clock dysfunction during neuroinflammation impairs oligodendrocyte progenitor cell recruitment and disrupts neuroimmune homeostasis.Frontiers in immunology · 2025Article
- Microglia Morphology in the Developing Primate Amygdala and Effects of Early Life Stress.eNeuro · 2025Article
- Brain-Resident Immune Cells in Neurodevelopmental Disorders.Advances in experimental medicine and biology · 2025Review
- The Neuroimmune System and the Cerebellum.Cerebellum (London, England) · 2024Review
- Hypothalamic neuronal-glial crosstalk in metabolic disease.npj metabolic health and disease · 2024Review
- Invariance of Mitochondria and Synapses in the Primary Visual Cortex of Mammals Provides Insight Into Energetics and Function.The Journal of comparative neurology · 2024Article
- CB2 expression in mouse brain: from mapping to regulation in microglia under inflammatory conditions.Journal of neuroinflammation · 2024Article
2 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
15 authors at 6 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Microglial cells play essential volume-related actions in the brain that contribute to the maturation and plasticity of neural circuits that ultimately shape behavior. Microglia can thus be expected to have similar cell sizes and even distribution both across brain structures and across species with different brain sizes. To test this hypothesis, we determined microglial cell densities (the inverse of cell size) using immunocytochemistry to Iba1 in samples of free cell nuclei prepared with the isotropic fractionator from brain structures of 33 mammalian species belonging to males and females of five different clades. We found that microglial cells constitute ∼7% of non-neuronal cells in different brain structures as well as in the whole brain of all mammalian species examined. Further, they vary little in cell density compared with neuronal cell densities within the cerebral cortex, across brain structures, across species within the same clade, and across mammalian clades. As a consequence, we find that one microglial cell services as few as one and as many as 100 neurons in different brain regions and species, depending on the local neuronal density. We thus conclude that the addition of microglial cells to mammalian brains is governed by mechanisms that constrain the size of these cells and have remained conserved over 200 million years of mammalian evolution. We discuss the probable consequences of such constrained size for brain function in health and disease.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.