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Updated: Dec 13, 2025
Author Spotlight: Investigating the Impact of Nutrition on Mouse Brain Function and Metabolic Disorders
Published on: September 6, 2024
Mastication Affects Transcriptomes of Mouse Microglia
Mineaki Seki1, Arisa Haino1, Tatsuya Ishikawa1
1Research Institute for Healthy Living, Niigata University of Pharmacy and Applied Life Sciences, Niigata, Japan.
Background/Aim:
We investigated whether mastication affects microglia, whose activity is thought to be associated with cognition and brain tumor progression.
Materials And Methods:
We kept mice by feeding either a hard or soft diet for 2, 4 or 8 months. After each period, we removed the whole brains and isolated microglia. The total RNA extracted from each brain's microglia was subjected to DNA microarray analysis.
Results:
Many genes were found to be significantly differentially expressed between hard- and soft-diet-fed mice in each group of the same feeding period. The expression of several genes involved in the regulation of actin cytoskeleton was down-regulated in the soft-diet-fed mice.
Conclusion:
Mastication may affect microglia's roles in cognition as well as their neuroimmune activity through their activity of patrolling the brain.
