Ageing Insulation

Signals speed through your nerves thanks to myelin sheaths – insulation that wraps around your nerves like plastic around wires. In ageing brains, defects in myelin sheaths occur deep in the brain. A mouse model of this reveals subsequent behavioural problems. Determining the effects on cognition, however, is trickier. Why? Because cognition experiments rely on readouts of physical abilities, which also depend on myelinated nerves. Researchers, therefore, looked at mutant mice lacking a vital myelin sheath protein, Plp1, in stem cells of the forebrain; fluorescence microscopy of mutant brain tissue (pictured, right) revealed loss of Plp1 specifically in the forebrain compared with normal mice (left). These mice had myelin defects similar to ageing brains but intact physical abilities, which allowed cognition experiments. These revealed problems with executive function, that is, processes that control behaviour to achieve certain goals. This has implications for ageing brains but also neuropsychiatric and myelin-related conditions.

Written by Lux Fatimathas

Lux Fatimathas

Writer

Having pursued science through a career in research, communications and publishing, she is currently a writer and editor for a healthcare marketing agency and also juggles freelance science writing.

• Image from work by Sahab Arinrad and Constanze Depp, and colleagues
• Departments of Clinical Neuroscience and Neurogenetics, Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences, Göttingen, Germany
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in eLife, March 2023