Microglial Rac1 is essential for experience-dependent brain plasticity and cognitive performance

Microglia, the largest population of brain immune cells, continuously interact with synapses to maintain brain homeostasis. We aimed at understanding the role of Rac1 on microglia functions. Here, we used conditional cell-specific gene targeting in mice with multi-omics approaches, and demonstrated that the RhoGTPase Rac1 was an essential requirement for the microglia to sense and interpret the brain microenvironment, and for crucial microglia-synapse crosstalk driving experience-dependent plasticity, a fundamental brain property impaired in several neuropsychiatric disorders. Microglia were isolated by MACS (CD11b+ cells) from 3 Rac1fl/fl (CT) and 3 Cx3cr1CreER+/:Rac1fl/fl (Rac1 cKO) and total RNA was extracted. Sequencing was performed on an Ion Torrent S5XL sequencerTM (Thermo Scientific)