Corticostriatal overactivity and alpha-synuclein overexpression produce striatal astrocytosis in mice
Miryam Moreno-Gómez, Desire Humanes-Valera, Jesús Pardo-Valencia, Noelia Mercado-García, Beatriz Pro-Sánchez, Ana Revuelto-González, Tiziano Balzano, Javier Blesa, Analía Bortolozzi, José Á. Obeso, Guglielmo Foffani · FENS Forum 2024
In Parkinson’s disease, nigrostriatal degeneration is associated with striatal astrocytes activation. However, the possible causal relationships between striatal astrocytosis and nigrostriatal degeneration remain unclear. Our central hypothesis is that corticostriatal alterations may act as a top-down stressor for retrograde nigrostriatal neurodegeneration (Foffani and Obeso, Neuron 2018). Here we tested whether chronically increasing corticostriatal activity and/or overexpressing corticostriatal alpha-synuclein may induce striatal astrocytosis in mice.Glutamatergic corticostriatal neurons in