Nature Communications (Mar 2020)

Functional hypoxia drives neuroplasticity and neurogenesis via brain erythropoietin

  • Debia Wakhloo,
  • Franziska Scharkowski,
  • Yasmina Curto,
  • Umer Javed Butt,
  • Vikas Bansal,
  • Agnes A. Steixner-Kumar,
  • Liane Wüstefeld,
  • Ashish Rajput,
  • Sahab Arinrad,
  • Matthias R. Zillmann,
  • Anna Seelbach,
  • Imam Hassouna,
  • Katharina Schneider,
  • Abdul Qadir Ibrahim,
  • Hauke B. Werner,
  • Henrik Martens,
  • Kamilla Miskowiak,
  • Sonja M. Wojcik,
  • Stefan Bonn,
  • Juan Nacher,
  • Klaus-Armin Nave,
  • Hannelore Ehrenreich

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-15041-1
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 11, no. 1
pp. 1 – 12

Abstract

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EPO treatment improves cognition, but underlying mechanisms were unknown. Here the authors describe a regulatory loop in which brain networks challenged by cognitive tasks drift into functional hypoxia that drives—via neuronal EPO synthesis—neurodifferentiation and dendritic spine formation.