Publications by authors named "Nina Offermann"

Systemic inflammation is established as part of late-stage severe lung disease, but molecular, functional, and phenotypic changes in peripheral immune cells in early disease stages remain ill defined. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a major respiratory disease characterized by small-airway inflammation, emphysema, and severe breathing difficulties. Using single-cell analyses we demonstrate that blood neutrophils are already increased in early-stage COPD, and changes in molecular and functional neutrophil states correlate with lung function decline.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Microglia are the tissue-resident macrophage population of the brain, specialized in supporting the CNS environment and protecting it from endogenous and exogenous insults. Nonetheless, their function declines with age, in ways that remain to be fully elucidated. Given the critical role played by microglia in neurodegenerative diseases, a better understanding of the aging microglia phenotype is an essential prerequisite in designing better preventive and therapeutic strategies.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Defective silencing of retrotransposable elements has been linked to inflammageing, cancer and autoimmune diseases. However, the underlying mechanisms are only partially understood. Here we implicate the histone H3.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Microglia are special cells in the brain that help keep everything balanced, but as mice (and people) get older, these cells can become more easily triggered by things that cause inflammation.
  • In older mice, a system called mTOR is more active, which makes proteins that can lead to inflammation to be produced more.
  • When scientists turned off the mTOR system, the mice showed less inflammation and sickness, even though some genes related to inflammation were still increased, suggesting that mTOR plays an important role in how microglia react as we age.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Chemokines are important signaling molecules in the immune and nervous system. Using a fluorescence reporter mouse model, we demonstrate that the chemokine CCL17, a ligand of the chemokine receptor CCR4, is produced in the murine brain, particularly in a subset of hippocampal CA1 neurons. We found that basal expression of Ccl17 in hippocampal neurons was strongly enhanced by peripheral challenge with lipopolysaccharide (LPS).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Catching primal functional changes in early, 'very far from disease onset' (VFDO) stages of Huntington's disease is likely to be the key to a successful therapy. Focusing on VFDO stages, we assessed neuronal microcircuits in premanifest Hdh150 knock-in mice. Employing two-photon Ca imaging, we revealed an early pattern of circuit dysregulation in the visual cortex - one of the first regions affected in premanifest Huntington's disease - characterized by an increase in activity, an enhanced synchronicity and hyperactive neurons.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Expanded CAG trinucleotide repeats in Huntington's disease (HD) are causative for neurotoxicity. The mutant CAG repeat RNA encodes neurotoxic polyglutamine proteins and can lead to a toxic gain of function by aberrantly recruiting RNA-binding proteins. One of these is the MID1 protein, which induces aberrant Huntingtin (HTT) protein translation upon binding.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Although the brain controls all main metabolic pathways in the whole organism, its lipid metabolism is partially separated from the rest of the body. Circulating lipids and other metabolites are taken up into brain areas like the hypothalamus and are locally metabolized and sensed involving several hypothalamic cell types. In this study we show that saturated and unsaturated fatty acids are differentially processed in the murine hypothalamus.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

A PHP Error was encountered

Severity: Warning

Message: fopen(/var/lib/php/sessions/ci_session01v87vsiukinbta99o10vcmb2bts9069): Failed to open stream: No space left on device

Filename: drivers/Session_files_driver.php

Line Number: 177

Backtrace:

File: /var/www/html/index.php
Line: 316
Function: require_once

A PHP Error was encountered

Severity: Warning

Message: session_start(): Failed to read session data: user (path: /var/lib/php/sessions)

Filename: Session/Session.php

Line Number: 137

Backtrace:

File: /var/www/html/index.php
Line: 316
Function: require_once