One Direction

How do you know which way you’re going? The answer lies in the mechanosensory system: a collection of sensory and nerve cells that gather information from the environment and feed it back to the brain. These green flower-like images are zebrafish sensory hair cells, kept alive under a microscope and watched over several hours as they connect up to a nerve cell (red). They’re normally found along the side of the fish, transmitting information about the direction of water flowing over them so they know which way they’re going. Some cells sense forward motion, while others can detect backwards flow. Impressively, the cells will still connect back up correctly after they are damaged and replaced or the nerves are cut. Similar combinations of hair cells and nerves are found in human sensory organs like the ear, so it will be interesting to see if these wiring processes are the same.

Written by Kat Arney

Kat Arney

Writer

Dr Kat Arney is an award-winning science writer, broadcaster and public speaker, and is the founder and Creative Director of First Create The Media.

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• Image from work by Marta Lozano-Ortega and Gema Valera, and colleagues
• Helmholtz Zentrum München, Munich, Germany
• Image originally published under a Creative Commons Licence (BY 4.0)
• Published in PLOS Biology, July 2018