 HHMI's Marc Tessier-Lavigne on Nerve-Cell Connections
It is one of
the most remarkable feats that a developing embryo must achieve: the correct wiring of
neurons to each other in the brain and to muscle and nerve cells throughout the body.
Billions, if not trillions, of precise connections must be made between cells for the
remarkable information-processing capacity of the brain to function. Basic researchers as
well as clinicians are keenly interested in how the nerve-cell connections, known as
axons, find their targets over distances that are, by cellular scales, huge.
Over the past
three years, neurobiologists have flooded journals with papers unraveling this extraordinarily complex
puzzle and deciphering the chemical guides that direct axons and lure them to their
targets. This burst of progress was sparked... |
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The Finest in Physical
Sciences
The former AT&T Bell Laboratories and the
University of Cambridge emerge as the top performers in a new Science Watch survey
of physical sciences research in the 1990s. The Murray Hill, New Jersey, facility...
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