New approach to fighting fetal brain dysfunction

A team from the Nagoya University Graduate School of Medicine in Japan has uncovered new information about how microglia, the resident immune cells in the brain, colonize the brain during the embryonic stage of development. Although erythromyeloid progenitors (EMPs) were previously thought to divide into either microglia or macrophages, the group found that macrophages that enter the brain primordium—the brain in its earliest recognizable stage of development—can become microglia at later stages of development.