Long-Distance
Distress Signal from Periphery of Injured Nerve Cells Begins with Locally Made
Protein
When the
longest cells in the body are injured at their farthest reaches, coordinating
the cells’ repair is no easy task. This is in part because these peripheral
nerve cells can be extremely long – up to one meter in adult humans – which is
a lot of distance for a molecular distress signal to cover in order to reach
the “command center” of the cell’s nucleus.
Scientists
have believed this process to be even more challenging because their textbook
understanding for many years has been that the axons – the long extensions of
nerve cells away from the main cell body containing the nucleus – do not
manufacture the proteins involved in the molecular signal themselves. Yet, in
recent years, some scientists have begun to challenge that textbook
understanding, with preliminary evidence that one key protein involved in
setting off a distress signal for cellular repair, known as importin beta1, was
locally produced in the axons. They just weren’t sure how.
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