Keeping Order

A teacher roams the classroom, keeping groups of children focussed on their separate projects. When she steps outside, desks start creeping, groups fuse, and chaos ensues. Such is the regulatory role of Copia – a sliver of genetic material in fruit flies that new research shows can form a protective shell around itself and shuffle between brain cells. It crosses synapses, where brain cells meet, and then restricts the formation of new connections to keep things in order. The researchers stimulated synapse formation in the junction between cells (pictured, new synapse formation in red) and found that reducing Copia’s activity (middle) or movement (bottom) increased synapse growth compared to normal conditions (top). This suggests Copia keeps this dynamic growth in check until it is needed, showing that the brain has built-in regulators of flexibility. Understanding these elements in humans might help explain brain disease, or even unveil new tools for intervening.

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 P. Githure M’Angale, Adrienne Lemieux and Yumeng Liu, and colleagues
• Department of Neurobiology and Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biotechnology, University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School, Worcester, MA, USA
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in PLOS Biology, February 2025