Shrub cells are true to form

It didn’t take a lot of brainpower to come up with the name for a nerve cell that looks like a bushy, round tangle of fibers perched atop a nucleus. Meet the shrub cell. This botanically named cell, discovered in the brains of adult mice, made its formal debut in the Nov. 27 Science.

The newly described cell lives in a particular nervy neighborhood — an area called layer 5 in the part of the brain that handles incoming visual information. Xiaolong Jiang of Baylor College of Medicine in Houston and colleagues defined shrub cells and other newcomers by their distinct shapes, their particular connections to other nerve cells or their similarities to nerve cells found elsewhere. Joining shrub cells are the freshly named horizontally elongated cells, deep-projecting cells, L5 basket cells and L5 neurogliaform cells. Each is an interneuron, a middleman that connects nerve cells to each other. The finding highlights the stunning variety of shapes and wiring patterns of cells in the brain.