Similar But Different

Sometimes you put exactly the same ingredients in, but the cake comes out different to the last time you baked it. And researchers have found that two brain cells can express (have active) very similar genes, but have different shapes and functions depending on where they are. They examined the way DNA is expressed in zebrafish neurons involved in vision, and found more than 60 cell types based on these patterns of genetic activity. However when they also compared the shape and visual response behaviour of these neurons, they found further differences even within the genetically-similar cell types (such as the blue and pink neurons pictured), suggesting that other local factors influence their shape and function. This could be part of why some disorders such as schizophrenia take hold more in some regions of the brain than others, and might help us better understand how a neuron’s environment affects its development.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image from work by Inbal Shainer and Johannes M. Kappel, and colleagues
• Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence, Martinsried, Germany
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Nature, February 2025