SRF-deficient astrocytes provide neuroprotection in mouse models of excitotoxicity and neurodegeneration

Reactive astrogliosis is a common pathological hallmark of CNS injury, infection, and neurodegeneration, where reactive astrocytes can be protective or detrimental to normal brain functions. Currently, the mechanisms regulating neuroprotective astrocytes and the extent of neuroprotection are poorly understood. Here, we report that conditional deletion of serum response factor (SRF) in adult astrocytes causes reactive-like hypertrophic astrocytes throughout the mouse brain. These SrfGFAP-ERCKO astrocytes do not affect neuron survival, synapse numbers, synaptic plasticity or learning and memory. However, the brains of Srf knockout mice exhibited neuroprotection against kainic-acid induced excitotoxic cell death. Relevant to human neurodegenerative diseases, SrfGFAP-ERCKO astrocytes abrogate nigral dopaminergic neuron death and reduce β-amyloid plaques in mouse models of Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease, respectively. Taken together, these findings establish SRF as a key molecular switch for the generation of reactive astrocytes with neuroprotective functions that attenuate neuronal injury in the setting of neurodegenerative diseases.

Molecular identification of an old clinical isolate of Indian Kala-azar

Molecular characterization is an important task for species identification of the isolates belonging to different Leishmania species. Clinical symptoms, tissue tropism, vector preference, reservoir and geographical distribution may act as distinguishing parameters but not always decisive. On the other hand, modern taxonomic tools employed to divulge characteristics of the genome or protein molecules of the parasite would be convincing and for Leishmania sp., they include nuclear and kDNA buoyant density, multi locus enzyme electrophoresis (MLEE), RAPD, RFLP or use of monoclonal antibodies etc. In the present study, we intend to establish the identification of an old clinical isolate of Indian Kala-azar, familiarly known as 'UR6' by MLEE, RAPD, RFLP and species specific monoclonal antibodies. UR6 has been isolated from a confirmed Kala-azar patient admitted in Calcutta School of Tropical Medicine, Kolkata in 1978. From then it is being regularly used for various scientific studies by the Leishmania Research Group of India and abroad. The isozyme profile of UR6 showed similar electrophoretic mobility that of WHO reference strain for Leishmania tropica, K27. Similar findings were obtained in the RAPD and RFLP assays. Screening with species specific monoclonal antibodies showed its strong reactivity towards L. tropica. The Jaccard's Similarity Indices were calculated.