(Medical Xpress) -- That the brain is evolution at its finest is perhaps best demonstrated by the beauty, complexity and diversity of dendrites – tree-like structures that form neural circuits by connecting ...
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Three scientists won the Nobel Prize in medicine on Monday for discoveries about the immune system that opened new avenues for the treatment and prevention of infectious illnesses and cancer.
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An ongoing lack of sleep during adolescence could lead to more than dragging, foggy teens, a University of Wisconsin-Madison study suggests.
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Using bioluminescent proteins from a jellyfish, a team of scientists has lit up the inside of a neuron, capturing spectacular video footage that shows the movement of proteins throughout the cell.
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University of British Columbia researchers have discovered the molecular pathway that enables receptors inside immune cells to find, and flag, fragments of pathogens trying to invade a host.
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(Medical Xpress)—A group of researchers in Austria and Switzerland has for the first time proven that immune cells migrate along chemical concentration gradients. This process has long been assumed but ...
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Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have made a counterintuitive finding that may lead to new ways to clear persistent infection that is the hallmark of such diseases as AIDS, hepatitis B and hepatitis C.
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Researchers at Queen Mary, University of London have discovered how a key molecule controls the body's inflammatory responses. The molecule, known as p110delta, fine-tunes inflammation to avoid excessive reactions that can ...
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(Medical Xpress)—Researchers have found that missteps in a basic cellular process, RNA splicing, is the culprit behind a class of rare neurological disorders manifested by intellectual disability and stunted development.
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Dendritic cells, or DCs for short, perform a vital role for the immune system: They engulf pathogens, break them down into their component parts, and then display the pieces on their surface. This in turn ...
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New research from UC Davis and Washington State University shows that PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls, launch a cellular chain of events that leads to an overabundance of dendrites — the filament-like projections ...
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UCLA researchers pinpointed a new mechanism that potently activates T-cells, the group of white blood cells that play a major role in fighting infections.
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To the surprise of investigating researchers, an animal model of Epstein Barr virus protected lupus-prone mice against development of the autoimmune disease. Earlier work had suggested that EBV might promote the development ...
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Korean scientists have used tiny stars, squares and triangles as a toolkit to create live neural circuits in a dish.
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(Medical Xpress)—Researchers from Australia and the USA have made a unique discovery about how the brain computes sensory information.
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Dendrites (from Greek δένδρον déndron, “tree”) are the branched projections of a neuron that act to conduct the electrochemical stimulation received from other neural cells to the cell body, or soma, of the neuron from which the dendrites project. Electrical stimulation is transmitted onto dendrites by upstream neurons via synapses which are located at various points throughout the dendritic arbor. Dendrites play a critical role in integrating these synaptic inputs and in determining the extent to which action potentials are produced by the neuron. Recent research has also found that dendrites can support action potentials and release neurotransmitters, a property that was originally believed to be specific to axons.
The long outgrowths on immune system dendritic cells are also called dendrites. These dendrites do not process electrical signals.
Certain classes of dendrites (i.e. Purkinje cells of cerebellum, cerebral cortex) contain small projections referred to as "appendages" or "spines". Appendages increase receptive properties of dendrites to isolate signal specificity. Increased neural activity at spines increases their size and conduction which is thought to play a role in learning and memory formation. There are approximately 200,000 spines per cell, each of which serve as a postsynaptic process for individual presynaptic axons.
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