Mysterious New Type of Human Brain Cell Discovered

The research team, co-led by Ed Lein, Ph.D., Investigator at the Allen Institute for Brain Science and Gábor Tamás, Ph.D., a neuroscientist at the University of Szeged in Szeged, Hungary, has uncovered a new type of human brain cell that has never been seen in mice and other well-studied laboratory animals.

Rosehip neuron. Image credit: tasnimnews.com (CC BY 4.0)

Tamás and University of Szeged doctoral student Eszter Boldog dubbed these new cells "rosehip neurons" -- to them, the dense bundle each brain cell's axon forms around the cell's center looks just like a rose after it has shed its petals, he said.

The newly discovered cells belong to a class of neurons known as inhibitory neurons, which put the brakes on the activity of other neurons in the brain.

The study hasn't proven that this special brain cell is unique to humans. But the fact that the special neuron doesn't exist in rodents is intriguing, adding these cells to a very short list of specialized neurons that may exist only in humans or only in primate brains.

The researchers don't yet understand what these cells might be doing in the human brain, but their absence in the mouse points to how difficult it is to model human brain diseases in laboratory animals.

One of his laboratory team's immediate next steps is to look for rosehip neurons in postmortem brain samples from people with neuropsychiatric disorders to see if these specialized cells might be altered in human disease.

The researchers took sections of the top layer of the cortex, the outermost region of the brain that is responsible for human consciousness and many other functions that we think of as unique to our species. It's much larger, compared to our body size, than in other animals.

It's the most complex part of the brain, and generally accepted to be the most complex structure in nature,

The Allen Institute group, in collaboration with researchers from the J. Craig Venter Institute, found that the rosehip cells turn on a unique set of genes, a genetic signature not seen in any of the mouse brain cell types they've studied.

The University of Szeged researchers found that the rosehip neurons form synapses with another type of neuron in a different part of the human cortex, known as pyramidal neurons.

What appears to be unique about rosehip neurons is that they only attach to one specific part of their cellular partner, indicating that they might be controlling information flow in a very specialized way.

If you think of all inhibitory neurons like brakes on a car, the rosehip neurons would let your car stop in very particular spots on your drive. (Tasnim News Agency)

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