Loose Connections

A loose connection on your TV aerial can ruin the signal, rendering it useless, so imagine what imperfect connections between brain cells might mean. Tuberous sclerosis (TSC) is a genetic disorder that causes non-cancerous tumours, and in some patients epilepsy, learning difficulties, or autism because of misconstructed neural wiring. How and why these errors occur is unclear, so researchers developed stem cells – cells with the potential to develop from scratch – from patients with TSC. The team then encouraged these stem cells to develop into brain cells (right), alongside healthy comparisons (left). They found the projections (green) reaching out from the cells were longer and followed a different pattern, showing how they may be going awry. Further investigation suggested that the misdirection was the result of an error in the signals sent to the cell skeleton. This study could eventually signal routes to new treatments.

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 adapted from work by Timothy S. Catlett and colleagues
• Department of Neuroscience, University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, Madison, WI, USA
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Nature Communications, May 2021