The Biology of Oligodendrocytes

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Traditionally, oligodendrocytes have been assumed to play a minor supporting role in the central nervous system and their importance has generally been overlooked. For the first time, this book provides a dedicated review of all of the major aspects of oligodendrocyte biology, including development, organization, genetics, and immunobiology. Later chapters emphasize the importance of this underestimated cell to the mammalian central nervous system by exploring the role of myelin synthesis and maintenance in neural disease and repair. Particular attention is paid to multiple sclerosis (MS), arguably the prime example of an acquired demyelinating disease, with detailed examinations of the current concepts regarding demyelination, oligodendroglial damage, and remyelination in MS lesions.

The Biology of Oligodendrocytes Review

Traditional neuroscience neglects the role of oligodendrocytes, choosing to view them instead only as supporters of central nervous system function and focusing entirely on neurons. This book reexamines the role of oligodendrocytes in the central nervous system with an emphasis on the relationship between neural disease and myelin synthesis and maintenance. To this end, the authors and editors were indeed successful, though the emphasis on diseased states somewhat complicates the explanation of normal oligodendrocyte function.
Written like a scientific review article with an extensive introduction at the start of every individual section, the book covers such diverse topics as the development of the study of oligodendrocytes, comparative biology of oligodendrocytes and Schwann cells, the development of oligodendrocytes and vertebral myelination, immunology of oligodendrocytes, and the dynamics of oligodendrocyte progenitor cells in aging nervous systems, while maintaining focus on myelin disease and injury. To me, by far the most interesting section was the section on the role of oligodendrocyte progenitor cells in remyelination following injury or disease.
The description of the development of neural disease and the activity of oligodendrocytes following injury is beyond reproach, and the book effectively outlines the underlying principals and problems with both the endogenous system of remyelination and transplantation of oligodendrocyte or oligodendrocyte progenitor cells into patients. The book also effectively outlines the potential of, and problems with, oligodendrocytes as therapeutic targets in spinal cord injury by extensively covering the cellular biology of oligodendrocytes down to specific ion concentrations.
The occasional diagram greatly facilitates the communication of concepts, specifically the degeneration of the myelin sheath and differentiation of oligodendrocytes, as well as differences between myelin degradation as a result of trauma, injury, or multiple sclerosis, though the diagrams are few and far between. The text is extremely detailed (read "dry") and covers the pathology of oligodendrocytes in injury down to the roles of specific receptors in pathological changes: "Oligodendrocytes possess both glutamate-activated AMPA and NMDA receptors which makes them sensitive to calcium influx" (page The exact biochemical underlying reasons of both initial and ongoing oligodendrocyte loss in injury or disease are described in triplicate.
When the subject under discussion extends beyond our current understanding of neuroscience, this fact is mentioned explicitly and the most applicable ongoing study is mentioned for the reader's further review, which I found to be extraordinarily valuable as I often felt the need to consult reference material while reading. When more technical aspects of oligodedrocyte biology are under discussion, the book successfully is able to distill the most important ideas and communicate them effectively and does so, for example, when describing the pathology of the myelin sheath under injury conditions.
The molecular basis of demyelination, like most other topics covered by the book, is covered in extreme, bordering on tedious, detail. Unlike other sections, however, the section on the molecular basis of demyelination is almost entirely unknown. To its credit, the book successfully avoids wild speculation and presents unknown values purely in terms of their limits based on known parameters: "The discovery of NMDA receptors on the oligodendrocyte as well as on its myelinated processes establishes that demyelination could occur without damage to the oligodendrocyte cell body. However, the molecular mechanisms of such demyelination and how it relates to oligendrocyte axonal damage remain to be elucidated."
By far the most detailed section, and thus probably the reason this section is the most interesting to me, outlines the response of oligodendrocytes and oligodendrocyte progenitor cells to disease and neural injury. The section begins with an introduction to the types of diseases and injuries that influence myelination, and proceeds to discuss the molecular basis for demyelination followed by molecular mechanisms of remyelination and the regeneration of oligodendrocytes. In addition, the book, to its credit, devotes almost equal time to the discussion of spontaneous myelin regeneration and the potential ways in which myelination can be induced, either through drugs or through transplantation of either oligodendrocytes or their associated progenitor cells.
The current problems with such transplantation are described to extend well beyond technical issues with cell isolation and placement, but also to ethical issues such as what kinds of ethical sources of myelinating cells and their associated progenitor cells exist and what is the cost of using them? The ethical issues receive nearly as much attention and detail as the technical issues to myelin repair, though the book gives no guarantee, only the hope, that scientific progress will someday render the technical issues surmountable. The ethical issues are only raised, and no concrete solutions are offered.
Prior to reading this book, I had no idea that multiple sclerosis patients already undergo extensive spontaneous myelin regeneration, though the endogenous myelin repair mechanism is ultimately unable to compensate for myelin loss: "recent studies emphasizing the success of spontaneous myelin repair, suprizing in that they show the average extent of remyelination in lesions to be as much as 47%. In addition, I feel that reading this book has given me an extensive understanding of diseases causing myelination and demyelinating injuries, though I did need to have several other reference volumes with me as I read.
In summary, I would highly recommend this book to any student of neuroscience or curious individual who is interested in changing their perceptions of an oft-neglected cell whose function is essential to proper nervous system function, and whose numbers far exceed those of the neurons they interact with as well as changing your perceptions of neural injury and disease. If you do not have any background in neuroscience or cellular biology, and are still interested in reading this book, I recommend that you have a plethora of reference material immediately available to you as this book can get very technical very fast. The molecular basis of myelin disease and injury is impeccably well described and extremely detailed though the emphasis on diseased states can lead to some confusion (at least this was the case for me). One of the most helpful aspects of this book are the in-line citations that greatly assist in the selection of proper reference material.

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