Single protein plays important dual shipping role in the brain
(WorldNews Health)

Just as a packaging breakdown can hamstring delivery of cables, switches and connectors to a house under construction, removing a protein from neurons can block the `shipment` of proteins to developing axons. Axons are the telephone wires of the nervous system. They convey information to dendrites on other nerve cells, in a processing network of phenomenal complexity that is the backbone of the entire nervous system. In a paper published Aug. 6 in Nature Communications, Edwin Chapman of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the University of Wisconsin­-Madison reports that halting production of synaptotagmin 17 (syt-17) blocks growth of axons. Edwin Chapman Equally significant, when cells...