That serves to amplify the transmission of signals from one nerve cell to another.
This chemical is a neurotransmitter: its molecules carry messages from one nerve cell to another.
Dr Denk, for example, tracks the myriad branches of a single nerve cell using an enzyme from horseradish.
The resulting pictures let the path taken by each nerve cell to be traced through the worm's body.
This substance is a neurotransmitter one of several dozen chemical messengers that carry signals from one nerve cell to another.
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The axon is the long protuberance from a nerve cell that connects it to the next cell in the circuit.
That increase, at least in cell cultures, made it likelier that a developing precursor cell would turn into a nerve cell.
ECONOMIST: Brain development may be influenced by genetic parasites
They found the voltage generated when the liposomes were exposed to light was high enough to make a nerve cell fire.
Academic researchers originally used the synthesized chemical to study nerve cell conduction.
Within an hour of a person falling asleep, slow waves will have covered his entire cortex, affecting every nerve cell in it.
Changes in this gene, which codes for a protein that facilitates nerve cell communication, have been linked to autism in various studies.
Scientists were able to detect signals from heart and nerve cell electro-flesh made this way, allowing them to measure changes in response to certain drugs.
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This promotes recovery of the use of your muscles, but it also places added stress on the nerve cell body to nourish the additional fibers.
They do so by starting chain-reactions that result in the addition and subtraction of molecular sub-units known as phosphate groups from particular proteins in the nerve cell being stimulated.
And if enough mitochondria are knocked out, a cell that uses a lot of energy (a nerve cell, for example) may not be able to carry out its activities properly.
It is also backed up by work done on both people and laboratory animals, which shows that stress changes the activity of neurotransmitters, the chemicals that carry signals from one nerve cell to another in the brain.
Changing the quantities of proteins such as the one made by PSD-93 would probably change the nature of the affected cell quite radically, and might even be responsible for generating the different types of nerve cell that are known to exist.
ECONOMIST: Brain development may be influenced by genetic parasites
One pertinent observation is that dolphins, whales and their kind have brains as anatomically complex as those of humans, and that these brains contain a particular type of nerve cell, known as a spindle cell, that in humans is associated with higher cognitive functions such as abstract reasoning.
DRD4 encodes a receptor molecule for a neurotransmitter called dopamine. (Neurotransmitters are chemicals that carry signals from one nerve cell to another.) Those with a variant of DRD4 called 7R, and also a large network of friends acquired during their adolescence, tended to be (in the American sense of the word) liberals ie, left wing.
Nerve-cell precursors can turn into two types of brain cell besides nerve cells.
ECONOMIST: Brain development may be influenced by genetic parasites
E. appears later in life as well, because it takes a long time for the initial trauma to give rise to nerve-cell breakdown and death.
Since 30% of the fatty constituents of nerve-cell membranes are DHA molecules, keeping your DHA levels topped up is part of having a healthy brain.
Some areas identified as particularly human are the regulation of the cone cells of the retina (which are involved in colour vision) and the regulation of nerve-cell growth.
Meanwhile, Targacept, a firm based in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, is looking at another group of nerve-cell proteins, the nicotinergic receptors, whose activation has been shown to increase alertness and may fend off cognitive decline.
The physical manifestations of the disease that Alois Alzheimer noticed in 1906 are sticky plaques of one type of protein, now known as beta-amyloid, and nerve-cell-engulfing tangles of a second type, called tau protein.
With the help of Chiara Cirelli, who also works at the University of Wisconsin, Dr Tononi has created a mutant fruit fly that sleeps only two or three hours a night. (A normal fly sleeps between eight and 14 hours.) The mutation itself is in a gene for a nerve-cell protein of a type known as an ion channel.
The researchers were led to this idea when they scanned the stem-cell precursors of nerve cells with a device called a gene chip.
ECONOMIST: Brain development may be influenced by genetic parasites
He was part of a team investigating the use of stem cells, which are able to become any other type of cell in the body from nerve to bone, taken from the amniotic fluid which surrounds a developing foetus in the womb.
They used stem cells from a human embryo, which are capable of becoming any other type of cell in the human body from nerve to skin, muscle to kidney.
The other concept, pursued by Pfizer, Japan's Ono Pharmaceutical, the AstraZeneca-Renovis partnership and numerous other firms, is to find a brain-cell protector that could be used to stabilize nerve cells and prevent further damage.
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