Word: berkeleys
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...Texas, Austin 299 233 3. Rice U. 204 138 4. Stanford U. 184 0 5. Texas A&M U. 183 141 6. U. Florida 177 162 7. Yale U. 165 0 8. lowa State U. 154 134 9. U. Oklahoma 153 134 10. U.C. Berkeley 131 90 Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
...developing nervous system has strung the equivalent of telephone trunk lines between the right neighborhoods in the right cities. Now it has to sort out which wires belong to which house, a problem that cannot be solved by genes alone for reasons that boil down to simple arithmetic. Eventually, Berkeley's Goodman estimates, a human brain must forge quadrillions of connections. But there are only 100,000 genes in human DNA. Even though half these genes--some 50,000--appear to be dedicated to constructing and maintaining the nervous system, he observes, that's not enough to specify more than...
...what awes scientists who study the brain, what still stuns them, is not that things occasionally go wrong in the developing brain but that so much of the time they go right. This is all the more remarkable, says Berkeley's Shatz, as the central nervous system of an embryo is not a miniature of the adult system but more like a tadpole that gives rise to a frog. Among other things, the cells produced in the neural tube must migrate to distant locations and accurately lay down the connections that link one part of the brain to another...
...scrambled as a bowl of spaghetti, according to Michael Stryker, chairman of the physiology department at the University of California at San Francisco. What sorts out the mess, scientists have established, is neural activity. In a series of experiments viewed as classics by scientists in the field, Berkeley's Shatz chemically blocked neural activity in embryonic cats. The result? The axons that connect neurons in the retina of the eye to the brain never formed the left eye-right eye geometry needed to support vision...
...recent finding has intrigued researchers more than the results reported in October by Corey Goodman and his Berkeley colleagues. In studying a deceptively simple problem--how axons from motor neurons in the fly's central nerve cord establish connections with muscle cells in its limbs--the Berkeley researchers made an unexpected discovery. They knew there was a gene that keeps bundles of axons together as they race toward their muscle-cell targets. What they discovered was that the electrical activity produced by neurons inhibited this gene, dramatically increasing the number of connections the axons made. Even more intriguing, the signals...