Staying in Touch

To get things done our cells need to work together and communicate. Neurons, which fire messages around the body, interact via packages exchanged at interfaces called synapses. When this goes wrong, serious illnesses such as hereditary spastic paraplegia and Alzheimer’s can result. Researchers looking at damaged (left) and healthy (right) fruit fry nerve cords (surprisingly similar to our own spinal cord) may have found a way to reopen these lines of communication when they break down. Synapses rely on molecules made some distance away in the neuron’s centre, which are ferried over by molecular motors. When these motors break, molecules accumulate in the wrong place. To prevent this, a mechanism to stop molecule production kicks in whenever the motors fail, but that has knock-on effects on synapses. It turns out, blocking this defence mechanism restores some crucial synapse activity, which could be good news for patients around the world.

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 Jiaxing Li and Yao V Zhang, and colleagues
• Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA
• Image originally published under a Creative Commons Licence (BY 4.0)
• Research published in eLife, September 2017