Beth Stevens

So work from Mark Freeman's lab who's now at the Volum Institute in Portland had shown this in flies actually and then Won Seok Chung who's at the Keist Institute in South Korea has also shown this in mammals that astrocytes are also extremely competently able to prune away these synapses if they're not needed during development.

So now the big question is, and this is work people like Beth Stevens at Harvard are doing and Sooyeon Hong are doing at University College in London, is with respect to microglia, do they prune too much in the context of disease? And this is something that seems to happen in diseases like Alzheimer's disease.

But also could astrocytes be doing this work? Could they be aberrantly taking away more than they need to? And this could be really problematic.

So again, this is an idea of something that is important for building the brain that in context of pathology is doing something that is... you know, detrimental to the brain.