On Nov. 18th, SIAT Association for International Communication held the forth English Salon (CAS-PIFI Talk) this year. Prof. Dr. Helmut Kettenmann from Germany, give a talk named "The dark side of the brain", over 30 domestic and international researchers and students attended it. Ms KUANG Yongzhen from the international cooperation office of SIAT hosted this activity. 

Prof. Helmut Kettenmann's research interests are focused on the role of glial cells in the normal and pathologic brain, now he is a researcher at Institute of Biomedical and Health Engineering of SIAT, chair professor and dean of the Department of Neurobiology, Faculty of Life and Health, University of SIAT. 

He is a professor at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine, a member of the German Academy of Sciences, president of the German Neurological Society, founder and editor-in-chief of the journal Glia.

He has published more than 400 publications in Nature, Nature Neuroscience, Neuron, Cell Rep, etc., and he is recognized as one of the founders of glial cell research. In 2020, he was awarded the Chinese Academy of Sciences-PIFI Program for Specially Needed Foreign Scientist and started research and industrial on neural mechanisms of brain cognition and brain diseases at SIAT.

In his talk, Prof. Helmut illustrated the early years of the 20th century were a thriving cultural and scientific period for brain science and described the discovery of microglia.

And with the development of research microscope, scientists could observed and studied the structure of the brain from a more microscopic perspective, they had discovered that nervous tissue is composed of two types of cells, neurons and glial cells, neurons and glial cells are intermingled in the brain, and the glial cell are the "dark side" of the brain, still leave many unknown places, which can be thought of as being like two sides of the moon, one is obvious and the other one is not.

There are main three types of neuroglia which have different functions: oligodendrocytes, microglia and astrocytes. Ongoing research pursues an expanded role that glial cells might play in signaling, but neurons are still considered the basis of this function. Neurons are important, but without glial support they would not be able to perform their function.