Keeping Things Separate

Untangling two impossibly intertwined sets of headphones at the bottom of your bag is maddening. Ideally, they wouldn’t get tangled in the first place, which is why inside the brain, where wiry networks of brain cells interweave, there are mechanisms to keep things in order. Two parallel networks of neurons process spatial and object-based information. Researchers interested in how these networks develop without disturbing each other analysed growth in the mouse brain. They found two molecules on the surface of cells (yellow and blue in the mouse brain section pictured) guide growth and prevent confusion. Each repels their counterpart's targets, while one actively attracts the neurons it aims to join, thus ensuring two separate networks form without any unwanted crossover. This cooperative attraction and repulsion helps each individual strand find its target, eventually constructing precise networks in the brain, where any misstep can have serious consequences.

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 Daniel Pederick and colleagues
• Department of Biology, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA
• Image copyright held by the original authors
• Published in Science, June 2021