Damage control in neurodegenerative diseases: epigenetic changes of reactive astrocytes as possible target for therapy design

VILLARREAL A

Capital Federal

Congreso; Humboldt Colloquium: "Shaping the Future of German-Argentinean Scientific Cooperation-Role of Curiosity-Driven Research"; 2018

A brief biography (running prose text, up to 1,500 characters, no tab form):I was born in Santa Rosa, La Pampa and after finishing high school I moved to Buenos Aires to study biology. At that time, I was interested in understanding how the brain ages.I became a biologist from the University of Buenos in 2009 after presenting my bachelor?s thesis in which I studied how death and survival of neurons can be regulated by molecules released from a region of the brain when it?s damaged.In 2014, I obtained my PhD in biology after studying the cellular and molecular response of astrocytes to brain injury. As an undergrad and PhD student, I worked under the supervision of Dr. Alberto Javier Ramos in the School of Medicine of the University of Buenos Aires. The lab belongs to the Instituto de Biología Celular y Neurociencias Prof. Eduardo De Robertis and I was funded by CONICET (National Scientific and Technical Research Council).Afterwards I became interested in learning epigenetics and so I moved to Freiburg, Germany, to work in this field under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Tanja Vogel at the Institute for Anatomy and Cell Biology, Dept. Molecular Embryology, University of Freiburg. There, we studied how chemical modifications of the chromatin can regulate neuronal differentiation during embryonic development of the brain. On April 2018, I returned to Argentina as an Assistant Researcher to study chromatin changes of astrocytes in situations of brain injury. I believe that understanding these molecular and cellular mechanisms will allow us to propose and investigate new therapeutic targets to reduce inflammation and increase neuronal survival and brain recovery.An abstract of your current academic project(s) with title (running prose text, up to 3,000 characters, no tab form):Neurodegenerative diseases and other pathological states of the brain such as trauma or stoke have the common feature of presenting neuronal death. Consequently, physiological phenomena such as behavior, memory, movement, etc. can result impaired. Another feature of neurodegenerative diseases is the appearance of an exacerbated immflamatory response.Although inflammation and the immune response are a defense mechanisms of our body, they can contribute after some time to neuronal death. It is now well accepted that neuronal death can appear as a consequence of the pro-inflammatory environment generated by other cells in the brain call glial cells such as microglia and astrocytes.Astrocytes are star-shaped cells which are residents in the brain and in normal conditions serve as metabolic and structural support to neurons. Further, they actively participate from synapses and blood flow in the brain by contacting blood vessels. In normal conditions these cells basically keep the homeostasis of the brain. However, in pathological conditions astrocytes increase in size and suffer drastic changes in morphology up to a point in which they can form a scar (see figure). The image shows astrocytes in green at different days post lesion (DPL).