Just like a gecko that regrows a broken tail, our peripheral nervous system knows how to regenerate the branches of its cells after an injury. Unfortunately, the cells in our central nervous system—our brain and spinal cord—are far more limited when it comes to regeneration.
In a new study, researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science have discovered that a protein, previously known to be expressed only duringembryonic cells
But to everyone's surprise, it now turns out that the PTBP1 protein is not expressed exclusively in undifferentiated embryonic cells; it is also expressed in adult neurons of the peripheral nervous system. That's the finding of a new study led by postdoctoral fellow Dr. Stefanie Alber and doctoral student Pierluigi Di Matteo in Prof. Mike Fainzilber's laboratory at Weizmann's Biomolecular Sciences and Molecular Neuroscience Departments.
On the way to its destination, or when it arrives, other molecules can bind to the RNA messenger, slowing or accelerating it and thereby controlling how many mail vans are produced and at what rate. The new study's surprising discovery was that not only is PTBP1 present in adult cells, it also binds extremely well to the mail van's messenger RNA. But how does the PTBP1 impact the function andTo answer that question, the researchers studied the response of neurons to an injury.
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