Brain Dance

Your brain starts off as a tube early in development — a neural tube formed from a flat sheet of cells. When the tube doesn't close properly, defects occur that can cause infant death. Exencephaly is the most common defect in neural tube closure. Researchers now investigate neural tube closure using mice, specifically looking at those with mutations in genes encoding a signalling pathway that’s important in brain development, the Sonic hedgehog pathway. They focused on mutations that affected cells at the edges of the flat sheet that becomes the neural tube, revealing that these mice ultimately develop exencephaly. A closer look uncovered that the affected cells didn’t constrict at their tops as they should. This disrupted folding of the flat sheet of neural tissue, as captured using fluorescence microscopy of a mutant developing brain (right) compared to a normal one (left), which provides clues to the genetic and mechanical causes of exencephaly.

Written by Lux Fatimathas

Lux Fatimathas

Writer

Having pursued science through a career in research, communications and publishing, she is currently a writer and editor for a healthcare marketing agency and also juggles freelance science writing.

• Image by Eric R Brooks and colleagues
• Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Developmental Biology Program, Sloan Kettering Institute, New York, NY, USA
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in eLife, October 2020