A new discovery published in Nature Neuroscience showed that male and female microglia expressed different sets of microRNAs at baseline and in response to tau pathology. Led by graduate student Lay Kodama in Gan lab, the study found that removal of microRNAs exacerbated tau aggregates in male but not in female tauopathy mice.
On the single cell level, only male, but not female, mice had increased number of disease associated microglia (DAMs) and decreased homeostatic microglia after microRNA removal in tauopathy mice. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-019-0560-7.