Monitoring in vivo function of cortical microglia.

Microglia, the innate immune cells of the brain, are becoming increasingly recognized as an important player both in the context of physiological brain function and brain pathology. To fulfill their executive functions microglia can modify their morphology, migrate or move their processes in a directed fashion, and modify the intracellular Ca2+ dynamics leading to modifications in gene expression, phagocytosis, release of cytokines and other inflammation markers, etc. Here we describe the recently developed tools enabling in vivo monitoring of morphology and Ca2+ signaling of microglia and show how these techniques may be used for examining microglial function in healthy and diseased brain.