10 July 2014
Memory Joggers
The saying "healthy in mind, healthy in body" is remarkably true. We know that exercise stimulates new nerve cells, or neurons, to grow in the hippocampus – a part of the brain that deals with learning, memory and mood. To find out how this happens, scientists studied these fledgling neurons in two groups of mice – one that had undergone exercise and one that hadn’t. They found that the neurons of mice that had exercised contained more mitochondria – the DNA power packs that drive cells – and that they were positioned differently to those of the non-exercised group. More research is needed to find out how the number and arrangement of mitochondria, stained green in the section of mouse hippocampus pictured, affect the growth of new neurons.
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- Image by Kathrin Steib and colleagues
- German Research Center for Environmental Health
- Copyright held by the Journal of Neuroscience
- Research published in the Journal of Neuroscience, May 2014
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