This week’s paper totally blew my mind. It’s so amazing to me that we know so much about how cells work and yet this paper describes a totally new process that has never been observed before. How’s that possible? What else remains to be discovered?In this week’s issue of Cell, Speese et al. describe a … Continue reading There’s more than one way to get out of a nucleus
Cellways blog
Electrically coupled cells make a connection
Inside our brains are billions of neurons, which communicate to each other via chemical messengers called neurotransmitters. Neurotransmitters are released from one cell and bind to receptors on a neighbor cell, creating a chemical synapse between the two neurons. Precise connections between neurons create microcircuits made up of multiple cells, which are responsible for processing … Continue reading Electrically coupled cells make a connection
I think, therefore I grasp
There is major interest in trying to “cure” paralysis and help patients overcome mobility limitations, trying everything from repairing damaged spinal cord neurons, to engineering human exoskeletons. One branch of this research focuses on brain machine interfaces (BMI) in which a multi-electrode recording chip is implanted into the brain. This array can “read” what the … Continue reading I think, therefore I grasp
Magneto…nope!
We have all heard about birds being able to sense the Earth’s magnetic field in order to navigate during migration, but how can they do that? There have been a number of studies that implicated iron-rich cells in the upper beak of birds as magnetoreceptors. Just like there are neurons that can sense mechanical stimuli, … Continue reading Magneto…nope!
The good, the bad and the noisy
I thought I would take a break from the complicated molecular pathways for a week and do an ecology paper. It was interesting to read an ecology paper because it was written in a totally different style. I made it half way through the methods section before I realized it wasn’t the results section. The … Continue reading The good, the bad and the noisy
Creating shocking memories
How does our brain make memories? We know that a brain region called the hippocampus is important for forming new memories. If this region is damaged or inhibited in mice or humans, memory formation is impaired. It has been hypothesized recently that a relatively small population of hippocampal neurons becomes activated during learning and that … Continue reading Creating shocking memories
Hot times are a-bloomin’
Remember a month ago, before the rains started, when it was warm and sunny and all the trees in Berkeley were blooming? The Magnolias and plum trees were particularly beautiful. From Berkeleyside blog How do the plants know that it’s warm and time to bloom? Plants can sense day length and will begin to grow … Continue reading Hot times are a-bloomin’
The rewards of sex and alcohol
There’s a new fruit fly article making the rounds this week. The public loves a good fruit-flies-acting-like-us story. The take home message is that male fruit flies that are deprived of sex are more attracted to alcohol (which affects them in a way similar to humans). Fruit flies like sex! Fruit flies like alcohol! Fruit … Continue reading The rewards of sex and alcohol
The buzz about novelty-seeking
One topic I have always been interested in is how complex behaviors are driven by genetics and molecular biology. For instance, all the courtship rituals of a male fruit fly are basically encoded by a single gene, and more specifically one small exon (a chunk of DNA within a gene). A recent paper by Liang … Continue reading The buzz about novelty-seeking
Translation of Touch
The language of neurons is ion movement across the cell membrane. When a neuron becomes activated, positive sodium ions rush into the cell through ion channels (gates in the cell membrane that can open and close). This flow of ions (also called “current”) is propagated from cell to cell, to initiate some sort of response … Continue reading Translation of Touch
Robin Ball 