Neuro

Heading for Trouble

Navigating your way through a dense crowd of people requires both physical strength and a bit of guile. Immune cells patrolling the tightly-packed cells of the skin face a similar challenge. Researchers examined how they do it, studying the role of microtubules – part of the cell skeleton that acts as both scaffold and internal transport network. They compared the behaviour of Langerhans cells, immune cells in the skin, under normal conditions to when their microtubule network was disrupted. They found that microtubules are crucial for navigation, rather than movement alone (pictured, blue Langerhans cells migrating towards a wound under normal conditions, 0–10s, and moving more aimlessly after microtubules are destabilised by a drug, 10–20s). The microtubule network acts as a steering and support system, helping immune cells keep their shape, clear debris, and find their way towards trouble.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Video from work by Eric Peterman and colleagues

Department of Biology, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

Video originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Published in Journal of Cell Science, September 2025

Harley Davidson Softail Deluxe 😁😁

The other day I was surfing the internet and I found this specialized painting colour wheel, it shows how real paint colours relate to each other. 

Outside: the purest/brightest colours.

Inside: naturally muted or earthy colors, like browns and ochres.

The Center: dark neutral tones used for mixing shadows.

The Lines: the lines connect colors that are opposites, if you mix them you neutralize the tone creating clean grays or browns instead of muddy puddles.

I want to share this with you because I think it is really illustrative!

Yusupov Palace St. Petersburg, Russia,

European Adder (Viperia berus), family Viperidae, Sweden

Venomous.

Forced into Life

Experiments on cells in the lab can require growing them in a more life-like 3D configuration, such as on 'scaffolds', rather than as a monolayer on the bottom of a Petri dish. Now, this study shows that subjecting sensory neurons and glial cells to sound-driven hydrodynamic forces in their growth medium causes them to assemble, organise and interact as in a dorsal root ganglion with functional fidelity without the need for scaffolds

Read the published research article here

Image from work by Junxuan Ma and colleagues

AO Research Institute Davos, Davos, Switzerland

Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Published in Cell Biomaterials, May 2026

Pain Pathways

Short term (acute) pain is important for alerting an animal to injury, preventing a repeat injury, and promoting healing. But if pain persists long after the initial insult, it can be problematic. Just ask one of the tens of millions of people who live with some form of chronic pain. It was thought that both types of pain were processed through essentially the same neural pathways. But recent research indicates parts of the circuity are separate – as seen in this mouse brain slice where chronic and acute pain neurons are coloured yellow and red respectively. In mice with induced chronic pain, inhibiting the activity of certain neurons could alleviate their chronic pain without affecting their acute pain responses. If novel drugs can be developed for specifically targeting chronic pain pathways, then, like those mice, patients might gain relief from chronic pain without their other senses being dulled.

Written by Ruth Williams

Image courtesy Xiaoke Chen, Stanford University re work by Qian Wang, Joo Han Lee and Gregory Nachtrab, and colleagues

Department of Biology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

Image originally published as 'use credit' equating to a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Research published in Nature, April 2026

𝗠𝗔𝗥𝗞 𝗥𝗢𝗧𝗛𝗞𝗢, Untitled (Red and Pink on Pink), 1953

Tempera on paper mounted on board with acrylic

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, bequest of Caroline Wiess Law.

100.6x64.1 cm

©  Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York