BackgroundGlutamate released by activated microglia induces excitotoxic neuronal death, which likely contributes to non-cell autonomous neuronal death in neurodegenerative diseases, including amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and Alzheimer's disease. Although both blockade of glutamate receptors and inhibition of microglial activation are the therapeutic candidates for these neurodegenerative diseases, glutamate receptor blockers also perturbed physiological and essential glutamate signals, and inhibitors of microglial activation suppressed both neurotoxic/neuroprotective roles of microglia and hardly affected disease progression. We previously demonstrated that activated microglia release a large amount of glutamate specifically through gap junction hemichannel. Hence, blockade of gap junction hemichannel may be potentially beneficial in treatment of neurodegenerative diseases.Methods and FindingsIn this study, we generated a novel blood-brain barrier permeable gap junction hemichannel blocker based on glycyrrhetinic acid. We found that pharmacologic blockade of gap junction hemichannel inhibited excessive glutamate release from activated microglia in vitro and in vivo without producing notable toxicity. Blocking gap junction hemichannel significantly suppressed neuronal loss of the spinal cord and extended survival in transgenic mice carrying human superoxide dismutase 1 with G93A or G37R mutation as an amyotrophic lateral sclerosis mouse model. Moreover, blockade of gap junction hemichannel also significantly improved memory impairments without altering amyloid β deposition in double transgenic mice expressing human amyloid precursor protein with K595N and M596L mutations and presenilin 1 with A264E mutation as an Alzheimer's disease mouse model.ConclusionsOur results suggest that gap junction hemichannel blockers may represent a new therapeutic strategy to target neurotoxic microglia specifically and prevent microglia-mediated neuronal death in various neurodegenerative diseases.

Following the profile decomposition of CeO2 X-ray powder data into individual structure factors, the maximum-entropy method (MEM) has been used to obtain an electron-density-distribution map. In the profile decomposition process, it is impossible to avoid the problems of overlapping peaks which have the same magnitude of reciprocal vectors, such as d*(511) and d*(333), for a cubic crystal, or very severely overlapping reflections. The formalism to treat such overlapping reflections in the MEM analysis is to introduce combined structure factors. The maximum value of the scattering vector, 47r(sin0)/A, which was used in the present analysis is small (about 7-8 •-1) but the resulting electrondensity-distribution map is of a high quality and much superior to the conventional map. As a consequence, the ionic charge of Ce and O ions can be obtained with reasonable accuracy from the MEM density map. Furthermore, the map reveals the existence of electrons around the supposedly vacant site surrounded by eight O atoms, which is probably related to the high ionic conductivity of this substance.

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