Nervous Disposition

The nerves in our peripheral nervous system work like electrical cables, carrying messages from our brain and spinal cord to the rest of our body. To help transport these messages, the nerve cell projections (also known as an axons; seen here in cross-section coloured purple) are bundled up in an insulating blanket made of Schwann cells (coloured green), which produce fatty layers of myelin (coloured black). Researchers have recently found that when a genetic pathway called the polycomb pathway is switched on, Schwann cells are redirected to restore injured axons. Changes to their genetic regulation reprograms Schwann cells to dissolve the existing myelin, and grow replacement myelin on the regenerated axon, revealing that they can have more than one role in our nervous system. This type of genetic pathway regulation could be found to play a role in other conditions associated with nerve damage.

Written by Katie Panteli

Katie Panteli

Writer

Katie, a Warwick Biomed graduate, works for a science-publishing house in London with some of the world's most respected scientific minds. She's most interested in human biology, anything and everything that makes us tick.

• Image by John Svaren
• Waisman Center, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, USA
• Image copyright held by original authors
• Research published in Journal of Neuroscience, August 2016