Microglia and monocytes: molecularly defined

01.09.2014

Prinz M

Acta Neuropathol. 2014;128(3):317-8

Acta Neuropathol.          online article

This issue of Acta Neuropathologica includes a cluster of four review articles on microglia, macrophages and monocytes and their roles in CNS pathologies, which appears more than 150 years after the first description of glia by the German pathologist Rudolf Virchow in 1858. He was just 37 years old when he gave a series of 20 lectures for colleagues and medical practitioners in Berlin. In the 13th lecture, he described “connective tissue originating from the brain and protruding onto the brain’s surface” and this was actually the birth of the term “glia”.