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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2018 Dec 1.
Published in final edited form as: Curr Opin Neurobiol. 2017 Nov 6;47:146–155. doi: 10.1016/j.conb.2017.10.007

Figure 2. Effect of early-life environmental challenge on microglial developmental trajectory.

Figure 2

A recent study investigating transcriptional and epigenomic regulation of microglia throughout brain development demonstrated that microglial development proceeds through distinct temporal stages: early microglia, pre-microglia, and adult microglia [47]. Further, accumulating data suggests that environmental exposures increases vulnerability in the offspring by accelerating microglial development [47,48]. Impacts on microglial transcriptional development likely have significant adverse consequences on neuronal development (e.g. by disrupting normal processes like pruning or phagocytosis), increasing the risk of disease.