Becoming a nerve cell: Timing is of the essence

Mitochondria are small organelles that provide the energy critical for each cell in our body, in particular, in the energy-demanding brain. In this week's edition of Science, a Belgian team of researchers led by Pierre Vanderhaeghen ...

Researchers develop the 'ultimate cell sorter'

In medicine and biology, there is great interest in efficient and inexpensive methods for identifying and separating different cell types, for example for medical diagnostics or for regenerative therapies using stem cells. ...

Lipid metabolism controls brain development

Neural stem cells are not only responsible for early brain development—they remain active for an entire lifetime. They divide and continually generate new nerve cells and enable the brain to constantly adapt to new demands. ...

Understanding congenital heart defects, one chicken at a time

Approximately 10 percent of infants are born with a congenital heart defect, with one of the most common being persistent truncus arteriosus—a hole in the heart. In a healthy baby, deoxygenated blood is pumped through a ...

Research identifies earlier origin of neural crest cells

Neural crest cells—embryonic cells in vertebrates that travel throughout the body and generate many cell types—have been thought to originate in the ectoderm, the outermost of the three germ layers formed in the earliest ...

Brain waves detected in mini-brains grown in a dish

Scientists have created miniature brains from stem cells that developed functional neural networks. Despite being a million times smaller than human brains, these lab-grown brains are the first observed to produce brain waves ...

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