Rhythm of Life

Whether you dance like a drunken dad or trained professional, you have rhythm in your bones. It underlies fundamental actions from walking to breathing. This rhythm comes from bursts of activity in brain circuits called central oscillators. These have proven hard to pinpoint and study, but new research has fully described one such circuit in mice. The collection of neurons (brain cells, pictured, green) control the regular swishing of a mouse’s whiskers, called whisking. When one neuron sparks into life, it inhibits those around it (with an inhibitor shown in red), which ultimately creates a coherent rhythm across the network, resulting in the regular movement. The scientists traced the neurons back from the whisker muscles, and found a cluster of cells all expressing a protein called parvalbumin (blue) leading the dance. This first isolation of a mammal oscillator could be a step towards understanding a fundamental aspect of our bodies.

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 Jun Takatoh and Vincent Prevosto and colleagues
• Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA
• Image copyright held by the original authors
• Research published in Nature, August 2022