Microglia enable cross-modal plasticity by removing inhibitory synapses.

Cross-modal plasticity is the repurposing of brain regions associated with deprived sensory inputs to improve the capacity of other sensory modalities. The functional mechanisms of cross-modal plasticity can indicate how the brain recovers from various forms of injury and how different sensory modalities are integrated. Here, we demonstrate that rewiring of the microglia-mediated local circuit synapse is crucial for cross-modal plasticity induced by visual deprivation (monocular deprivation [MD]).