![]() This axon terminal releases chemical messengers known as neurotransmitters (blue dots), into the space between the two cells, called the synaptic cleft. When a nerve cell communicates with another nerve cell, the message is transmitted from the tip of an axon, the long slender arms that extend from the cell’s main body. ![]() These neurotransmitters tell the receiver cell to either activate its own electrical charge, which sends the signal to the next neuron in the chain, or tell the receiver cell to stay quiet. If an electrical signal passes down an axon, its tip releases chemicals called neurotransmitters into the synapse. When the axon tip of a transmitter connects to a receiver, that’s a synapse. A second neuron, the receiver, can receive contacts along its main body, or along strands that branch out like a tree, called dendrites. So one neuron, the transmitter, uses a really thin strand called an axon. A brain cell, or a neuron, has a large main body, with small strands sticking out. It’s basically a connection: one cell talking to another. What exactly is a synapse, and what happens there? The links between neurons are called synapses. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. ![]() She spoke with Knowable Magazine about key discoveries in the study of brain networks, and new work revealing their importance in disease. Now director of the Center for Neuroscience at the University of California, Davis, McAllister continues to investigate how the brain’s nerve cells - called neurons - find each other, connect and disengage. As a graduate student in the 1990s studying developmental neurobiology, she was drawn to the question of how the brain is built: how individual brain cells in a growing fetus somehow organize themselves into an organ capable one day of pondering the mysteries of life. Kimberley McAllister has been fascinated by the human brain since college. By sending electrical signals from nerve cell to nerve cell within a great network of connections, the brain creates thoughts as mundane as “Where are my keys?” or as profound as “I think, therefore I am.” That’s because it’s the connections between those cells that make the brain so amazing. No thoughts, no worries, no wonder or awe. You and we have the right to know, learn, read, hear what and how we deem appropriate.Īll donations are kept completely private and confidential.If you were to take a human brain and toss it in a blender - not that you should - the resulting slurry of cells wouldn’t be special in the way that the human brain is. ![]() Our website is open to any citizen journalists and organizations who want to contribute, publish high-quality insights or send media releases to improve public access to impartial information. It is a bumpy road with all sorties of difficulties. We endeavour to provide the community with real-time access to true unfiltered news firsthand from primary sources. This tendency is not only totally unacceptable, but also to a degree frightening). According to independent assessment, about 98% of the media sector is held by three conglomerates. Since the trend of consolidation is and has historically been upward, fewer and fewer individuals or organizations control increasing shares of the mass media in our country. Media ownership in Australia is one of the most concentrated in the world ( Learn more). We don't put up a paywall – we believe in free access to information of public interest. Well, unlike many news organisations, we have no sponsors, no corporate or ideological interests. “This finding opens the door to new strategies to offer support to those with FXS and possibly other autism spectrum disorders to correctly perceive sensory signals from the outside world at the level of pyramidal neurons in the cortex,” concluded Araya. “Even in the absence of the FMRP protein, which has several functions in the brain, we were able to demonstrate how the representation of sensory signals can be restored in cortical neurons by reducing the expression of a single molecule,” she said. Soledad Miranda-Rottmann, also first co-author of the study, attempted to rectify the situation with genetic and molecular biology techniques. According to the research group’s work, it is the absence of this protein that alters the way sensory inputs are combined, causing them to be underrepresented by the signals coming out of the cortical pyramidal neurons in the brain. A protein called FMRP that is absent in the brains of people with FXS modulates the activity of a type of potassium channel in the brain.
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