Detecting odors and differentiating between them is an essential ability that helps animals to survive and interact more effectively with their surrounding environment. In mammals, odors are known to be initially processed ...
The prefrontal cortex (PFC) is a crucial part of the mammalian brain, known to be involved in decision-making, planning, complex social behavior and integrating the activity of other brain regions. While countless neuroscience ...
The peripheral nervous system is comprised of all nerves outside of the brain and the spinal cord (i.e., the central nervous system). Peripheral nerves contain a variety of different cell types, including glial cells.
Nerve cells stripped of their insulation can no longer carry vital information, leading to the numbness, weakness and vision problems often associated with multiple sclerosis. A new study shows an overlooked source may be ...
Nov 27, 2018
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(Medical Xpress)—The nervous system is host to some of the most sophisticated cellular structures found anywhere in the body. The orderly phalanxes of sterocilia which arm the ear's inner hair cells, and the photosensitive ...
(Medical Xpress)—It is widely know that the grey matter of the brain is grey because it is dense with cell bodies and capillaries. The white matter is almost entirely composed of lipid-based myelin, but there is also a ...
(Medical Xpress)—The Lateral Geniculate Nucleus (LGN) of the thalamus is a busy place, especially during development. Although it receives inputs from many regions of the brain, the first class seats are reserved for axons ...
Dendrites, the branch-like projections of neurons, were once thought to be passive wiring in the brain. But now researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have shown that these dendrites do more than relay ...
Oct 27, 2013
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(Medical Xpress)—When Descartes turned his critical eye to the nervous system, he reasoned that the nerves must transduce hydraulic power to control the musculature. In the circulatory system, blood is pushed comparatively ...
While popularly publicized neuroscience research focuses on structural and functional connectomes, timing patterns of axonal spikes, neural plasticity, and other areas of inquiry, the intraneuronal environment also receives ...
An axon or nerve fiber is a long, slender projection of a nerve cell, or neuron, that conducts electrical impulses away from the neuron's cell body or soma.
An axon is one of two types of protoplasmic protrusions that extrude from the cell body of a neuron, the other type being dendrites. Axons are distinguished from dendrites by several features, including shape (dendrites often taper while axons usually maintain a constant radius), length (dendrites are restricted to a small region around the cell body while axons can be much longer), and function (dendrites usually receive signals while axons usually transmit them). All of these rules have exceptions, however.
Some types of neurons have no axon—these are called amacrine cells, and transmit signals from their dendrites. No neuron ever has more than one axon; however in invertebrates such as insects the axon sometimes consists of several regions that function more or less independently of each other. Most axons branch, in some cases very profusely.
Axons make contact with other cells—usually other neurons but sometimes muscle or gland cells—at junctions called synapses. At a synapse, the membrane of the axon closely adjoins the membrane of the target cell, and special molecular structures serve to transmit electrical or electrochemical signals across the gap. Some synaptic junctions appear partway along an axon as it extends—these are called en passant ("in passing") synapses. Other synapses appear as terminals at the ends of axonal branches. A single axon, with all its branches taken together, can innervate multiple parts of the brain and generate thousands of synaptic terminals.
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