Draining the Pool

It would be a problem if a small child gained access to a savings account established to last them a lifetime and splurged it all on toys and sweets. A new study suggests something similar may happen to a pool of neural stem cells – brain cells stored for lifelong neuron growth – when a particular gene, Sox5, is missing or mutated. Researchers found Sox5 is essential for ensuring these cells enter full quiescence – a type of cellular hibernation. Without Sox5, some cells fall only lightly dormant, prone to premature activation which causes an early burst of neuron growth (pictured, blue in a young mouse hippocampus, with Sox5-deficient cells in pink) which depletes the store. Without Sox5 in control, a signal encouraging cells into this shallow sleep proliferates, and experiments inhibiting this signal reduced the overactive neuron growth, which might point to new possible treatments for related conditions such as Lamb-Shaffer syndrome.

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 Cristina Medina-Menéndez, Paula Tirado-Melendro and Lingling Li, and colleagues
• Instituto Cajal, CSIC, Madrid, Spain
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in PLOS Biology, July 2025