This knowledge should be transferable to how neurons decide to die off post-stroke. Ask your researcher about it.
http://www.biosciencetechnology.com/news/2014/04/protein-nerves-determines-which-brain-connections-stay-which-go?et_cid=3860152&et_rid=648870051&location=top
A newborn baby, for all its
cooing cuddliness, is a data acquisition machine, absorbing information
to finish honing the job of brain wiring that started before birth. This
is true nowhere more so than the eyes, which start life peering at a
blurry world and within months can make out a crisp, three-dimensional
image of a mobile dangling overhead.
This process of refining the brain's wiring involves cutting off some
of the excess nerve connections we have at birth while strengthening
connections we use all the time. Some estimates show that as many as
half of the brain's connections formed during development are clipped
back as the final wiring takes shape.
Carla Shatz, the David Starr Jordan Director of Stanford Bio-X, and
her team, including postdoctoral researcher Hanmi Lee, PhD, and Bio-X
graduate fellow Jaimie Adelson, recently found a protein that is
essential for the brain to remove those excess connections. The team
specifically showed a role for the protein in the developing visual
system in mice, but their findings, published March 30 in Nature, appear to apply broadly across the developing brain.
Shatz said the discovery helps clear up something that has been a
mystery to those who study brain development: How does the decision get
made to eliminate some connections? It also settles a decade-long debate
over whether the nervous system or the immune system is making those
decisions. (Spoiler alert: It's the nervous system.)
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