{"doi":"10.1002/cne.70108","title":"Obituary: Jose Manuel García‐Verdugo (1954–2025), an Exceptional Eye Into the Fine Structure of the Brain's Germinal Centers","abstract":"Under the electron microscope, one gazes upon the hidden constellations of the cell's inner world: tiny ribosomes scattered like distant stars, organelles orbiting the nucleus like planets around the sun, all held together in perfect harmony by the cytoskeleton. Much like the images of space, electron microscopy (EM) captures a frozen moment of our cells’ universal dance. Such complexity is not easily deciphered. Only the truly trained and devoted few can glimpse the dynamic nature behind these frozen moments and extract new meaning. As Santiago Ramón y Cajal beautifully put it: “It is not enough to examine, we also need to contemplate. Let us infuse the things we observe with emotion and affection; let us make them our own with both our hearts and our intellects.” Jose Manuel García-Verdugo, or “Verdugo” as everyone knew him, was one of those rare scientists who could make this leap, to contemplate and become immersed in the ultrastructure of the central nervous system. His electron microscopic images and inferences unlocked a new understanding of the germinal centers in the adult vertebrate brain. The beloved professor, colleague, friend, and teacher (Figure 1) died at the age of 70 in Valencia, Spain. Verdugo was born in Ceuta, located on the North African coast. He earned his degree in Biological Sciences from the University of La Laguna in Tenerife and completed his PhD at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. He began his scientific career focusing on the neuroanatomy of the reptilian brain. Early on, he developed an expertise in EM and showed an extraordinary ability to identify the brain's cytoarchitecture and cellular components with remarkable precision. Working with his thesis advisor, Carlos Lopez-Garcia, Verdugo discovered that new neurons are generated in the adult reptilian brain (Garcia-Verdugo et al. 1986, 1989) and can contribute to brain regeneration (López-García et al. 1992; Font et al. 1997). These findings emerged at a time when the field of adult brain neurogenesis was in full resurgence. Driven by the curiosity to explore whether adult neurogenesis occurred in species beyond reptiles, Verdugo began a long-term collaboration with one of us (A.A.-B.) to investigate the mechanism of neuronal birth and neuronal migration in the adult mammalian and avian brains. His ultrastructural observations were key to the discovery of neuronal chain migration (Figure 2a) (Lois et al. 1996) and to the identification of the cell types and their organization within the main germinal centers of the adult rodent brain: the ventricular-subventricular zone (V-SVZ) (Doetsch et al. 1997) on the walls of the lateral ventricles and the subgranular zone (SGZ) of the hippocampus. His observations at the electron microscope were also critical to the identification of neural stem cells (NSCs), the primary progenitors for the generation of new neurons in adult brains (Figure 2b,c) (Doetsch et al. 1999; Seri et al. 2001). His earlier observations in adult lizards, characterizing the cellular composition of the ventricular epithelium (Garcia-Verdugo et al. 1981), paved the way to the characterization of adult NSC niches, both in birds (Alvarez-Buylla et al. 1990, 1998) and rodents (Doetsch et al. 1997). Proliferating radial glia in adult birds and lizards were suggested to correspond to the NSCs giving rise to the new neurons (Alvarez-Buylla et al. 1990, 1998; Garcia-Verdugo et al. 2002). In rodents, the basal process of radial glia retracts, and they transform into local astrocytes; Verdugo's careful EM analysis identified the two types of astroglial cells (B1 and B2 cells) that later work showed corresponded to the NSCs (Doetsch et al. 1999; Mirzadeh et al. 2008; Cebrian-Silla et al. 2025). He also contributed to the demonstration that the multiciliated ependymal cells in the lateral ventricles are mostly born in the embryo and do not function as NSCs in the adult (Spassky et al. 2005). In the SGZ of the hippocampus, Verdugo's EM wor","journal":"The Journal of Comparative Neurology","year":2025,"id":580612,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":0,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.8951,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2025-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":226816,"name":"Mercedes F. Paredes","orcid":"0000-0003-2503-1447","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":628504,"name":"Arantxa Cebrián‐Silla","orcid":"0000-0003-4623-7655","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1492098,"name":"Arantxa Cebrian‐Silla","orcid":null,"position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":41,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T02:58:43.046112Z","pmid":"41207880","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}