It takes a village of proteins
When a nerve cell in the brain sprouts a new “tentacle” to forge a connection with a neighbor, the proteins in the budding arm differ from those in the cell’s body, a new study shows.
Using techniques from the burgeoning field of proteomics—the effort to study the cell’s entire set of proteins—researchers tracked the concentrations of 4,855 distinct proteins in human-nerve cells. With this big-picture view of protein activity in hand, the scientists discovered how some proteins fine-tune the growth of new connections among neurons.