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led by Shigeki Watanabe of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, was partly conducted in the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) Neurobiology course, where Watanabe has served on the faculty since 2015.

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. That strand is the axon, which conducts electrical signals to terminals where the cell communicates with other neurons. Axons have long been depicted as smooth and cylindrical, but a new study of mouse neurons challenges that view. Instead, it suggests their natural shape is more like a string of pearls. Even more provocatively, the authors propose those pearly bumps serve as control knobs, influencing how quickly and precisely the cell fires its signals.

The study, published today in Nature Neuroscience, should “100%” change how we’ve been thinking about neurons and their signals, says senior author Shigeki Watanabe, a molecular neuroscientist at John Hopkins University. Some outsiders agree. The findings are “highly significant and I think have been overlooked for quite some time,” says evolutionary biologist Pawel Burkhardt of the University of Bergen, who recently spotted similar pearl structures in neurons from tiny marine invertebrates known as comb jellies. .

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