The building blocks of our brain cells may have begun to form back when our ancestors were still a blobby collection of animal cells oozing through the ocean's shallows.
Researchers from Spain and Germany have discovered characteristics of specialized secretory cells in simple animals calledRoughly the size of a grain of sand, these basic creatures have no organs, consisting of little more than a colony of different cell types. Much as they still do today, placozoans once hunted microbes and browsed algae in the warm shallows of seas 800 million years ago.
But they're missing other specialized components our neurons have to receive peptide signals or generate electrical signals. Instead they use
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Tiny sea creatures reveal the ancient origins of neuronsA study in the journal Cell sheds new light on the evolution of neurons, focusing on the placozoans, a millimeter-sized marine animal. Researchers at the Center for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona find evidence that specialized secretory cells found in these unique and ancient creatures may have given rise to neurons in more complex animals.
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'Circular logic' of RNAs in Parkinson's diseaseResearchers are gaining new insights into neurological diseases by studying circular RNAs (circRNAs) in brain cells. A new study has identified over 11,000 distinct RNA circles that characterized brain cells implicated in Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease.
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A catalog of all human cells reveals a mathematical patternSmaller cells occur in larger numbers in the human body, and cells of different size classes contribute equally to our overall mass.
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Strange Mathematical Pattern Found in The Cells of The Human BodyFrom the oxygen-carrying corpuscles in our blood to the branching neurons that govern our thoughts, our body is built of a dazzling variety of cells.
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