cell body

Flip open any neuroscience textbook and the depiction of a neuron will be roughly the same: a blobby, amoebalike cell body shooting out a long, thick strand.

And hundreds of centrioles, intended for eventual construction of cilia at the cell surface, got stuck in the cell body.

Importantly, it was able to reveal the features where many synapses dwell: the spines that protrude along the vine-like processes, or dendrites, that grow out of the neuron cell body.

"Until this point, models primarily accounted for variables at the scale of the whole cell -- its size, or the time it took to divide, etc. But we know the cell makes these decisions based on amounts of certain molecules in the cell body," Associate Professor Mugler said.

Underpinning this process is a phenomenon known as dendritic translation, which involves an uptick in localized protein production within dendrites, the spiny branches that project off the neuron cell body and receive signals from other neurons at synapses.