Abstract

Breathing is essential for the life, this is generating for the respiratory patron generator (RPG). The RPG is compound for a neural network distributed along the ventral (VRC) and dorsal (DRC) respiratory column, here there are cells capable of sensing the changes of CO 2 and H + , and in this way modulate the respiratory rhythm. Some studies found that these cells are neurons, but recently was found that astrocytes are capable to also respond at these changes, for that reasons we think that astrocyte are not the only one glial cells implicated in the modulation of respiratory rhythm, microglia is a glial cell that is tightly relationed with the astrocytes, as they release factors that allow their proliferation. In this work we study brainstem microglia, inducing respiratory acidosis in adult mice, after which the brain is extracted, to perform an immunohistochemistry against Iba-1, a microglia marker, this was also done in control animals. We find morphological changes in the microglial cells of those tissues that were exposed to hypercapnia, but this was not found in the tissue of animals that were not exposed to this stimulus, which would indicate that these cells would be activated in response to the hypercapnic acidosis.