Prof. Sandra Siegert (IST Austria)

Brain dysfunction has a detrimental effect on our daily lives. Yet, surprisingly little is known about how microglia, traditionally classified as immune-responsive cells, maintain brain functionality and how deviation from this task will induce disease onset.

My talk will start with a short trajectory on how I shifted my neuro-centric perspective of the brain towards microglia. Then, I will present our initial struggles using the oversimplified assumption and methodologies in the glia field to classify microglia morphology and introduce our newly developed classifier morphOMICs to overcome these limitations. In the last part, I will focus on how changes in neuronal activity stimulates microglia to adapt the extracellular space – in a sex-specific manner.