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Express neurons

30.09.2014

The standard form of a nerve cell is represented as follows: several branched processes-dendrites and one long non-branching process-axon depart from the body of a neuron. Through the dendrites, the neuron receives impulses from neighboring cells, through the axon it transmits impulses further, while the impulses necessarily pass through the cell body - after all, both the axon and the dendrites originate from it. This is the general scheme of the structure for all neurons, and no matter how its processes branch and no matter how numerous they are, the cell body will always be the “staging post” for the electrochemical reaction running along the membrane.

All the more surprising was the discovery of neuroscientists from the universities of Bonn and Heidelberg (Germany), who found neurons with axons growing directly from dendrites. Christian Thome, Alexey Egorov and their colleagues described their discovery in the journal Neuron.

A new type of cell was found in the brain of mice, or rather, in the hippocampus, which is one of the most important centers of memory and orientation in space. Many of the neurons in the hippocampus, called pyramidal cells, are extremely branched: they collect information from many other neurons, so they cannot do without densely branching dendrites.

The researchers decided to analyze the intercellular contacts of pyramidal neurons with their neighbors, and for this they modified neurons by providing them with a fluorescent protein that marked the bases of cell processes. It turned out that in about half of the cells, the axon departs not from the cell body, but from the dendrite, from its lower part, closest to the cell body. The hippocampus is divided into several structural and functional zones, and in each of them the proportion of unusual cells was different, but there is no doubt that there are really many such cells.

Such an unusual structure should somehow affect the functioning of cells. Indeed, it turned out that the dendrites from which the axon grows respond more readily to stimulation - for example, they needed less neurotransmitter to trigger an impulse. In other words, such dendrites had a lower excitation threshold, which means that they could respond to weak signals.

To an external stimulus that would come through such a dendrite, the cell (and the nerve chain connected to it) would respond faster, without waiting for the external stimulus to increase its power. The activity of such neurons is obviously difficult to suppress, and they may be designed to convey information of particular importance. However, the work of abnormal neurons remains to be studied and studied. They have not yet been searched for in the human brain, however, given that the human hippocampus and the mouse hippocampus repeat each other's structure, and, most likely, primates also have such cells.

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