Master Cells

In this section of brain tissue, there is just a single chandelier cell (red) in a crowd of other neurons (green), but it’s the one calling the shots and controlling the masses. Indeed, if you look closely, you can see the chandelier cell’s multitude of long, thin, branching arms (axons) – which incidentally give the cell its name – making contact with practically every other cell, enabling it to exert control. Evidence suggests dysfunction of these rare but powerful cells is linked to a range of important disorders including autism, schizophrenia and epilepsy, but the cells’ scarcity makes them difficult to study. Thankfully, newly developed labelling techniques are facilitating the identification and analysis of chandelier cells, shedding light on how they develop, how they establish their numerous interactions and dominance, and of course, how defects in their functioning leads to debilitating neurological diseases.

Written by Ruth Williams

Ruth Williams

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Ruth is a freelance science journalist based in the US. She's a regular correspondent for The Scientist, and her work has appeared in The Lancet, Nature, Scientific American Mind, BBC Focus and elsewhere. Twitter @rooph

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• Image from work by Nicholas B.Gallo, Anirban Paul and LindaVan Aelst, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
• Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Cold Spring Harbor, NY, USA
• Image copyright held by the original authors
• Research published in Trends in Neurosciences, June 2020