Dr. Arthur Warrington

Arthur Warrington was the recipient of the 1994 Marian Kies Award. His mentors were Dr. Steven Pfeiffer and Dr. Rashmi Bansal in the Department of Neuroscience at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine. His thesis work determined the in vivo proliferation, differentiation and myelination potential of defined populations of the oligodendrocyte lineage. Neonatal rat glial cells were immuno isolated based on surface antigen expression and transplanted into the myelin basic protein deficient neonatal shiverer mouse brain. The number of transplanted mature MBP+ oligodendrocytes and the total area of MBP+ myelin within an entire host brain was measured using thick serial tissue sections and confocal microscopy. The study concluded that the sulfatide positive/ galactosylcerebroside-phenotype was the most mature stage with significant proliferative capacity and the first post migratory stage. This helped to define which stages of transplanted cells committed to the oligodendrocyte lineage may be capable of targeting demyelinated lesions. With the help of Dr. John Carson he was one of the first to use confocal microscopy to reconstruct an image of the complete myelin sheaths and process extensions elaborated by a single oligodendrocyte in vivo. Dr. Warrington went on to a postdoctoral fellowship with Dr. Lynn Hudson at the National Institutes of Health and has been a member of the Department of Neurology at Mayo Clinic, Rochester Minnesota since 1997.