Teeny tiny hairs on brain cells could have big jobs

Author: Laura Sanders / Source: Science News for Students

Most cells in the body — including those in the brain — have a single tiny antenna. These short, narrow spikes are known as primary cilia (SILL-ee-uh).

Each one is made of fat and protein. And these cilia will have different jobs, depending on where their host cells live. In the nose, for example, these cilia detect odors. In the eye, they help with vision. But their role in the brain has remained largely a mystery. Until now.

There are no odors to smell or light to see in the brain. Still, those tiny stubs appear to have big jobs, a new study reports. For instance, they may help control appetite — and possibly obesity. These cilia seem to contribute to brain development and memory. They might even help nerve cells chat.

“Perhaps every neuron in the brain possesses cilia,” says Kirk Mykytyn. Yet, he adds, most people who study the brain don’t even know they’re there. Mykytyn is a cell biologist. He works at Ohio State University College of Medicine in Columbus.

Christian Vaisse is a molecular geneticist. That’s someone who studies the role of genes — bits of DNA that give instructions to a cell. He is part of a team at the University of California, San Francisco who studied a protein called MC4R in search of clues about what cilia might do in the brain.

His group had known that tiny changes in the way MC4R does its job could lead to obesity in people. In mice, MC4R is made in the middle of the cell. Later, it moves to take up residence on cilia of the brain cells that help control mousey appetites. Vaisse and his colleagues already knew that MC4R didn’t always look the same. Some of its molecules looked unusual. The DNA in some cells must have developed some natural tweak — or mutation — that altered how the body made this protein.

Such mutations might also have changed how the protein worked.

For instance, one altered form of MC4R is connected to obesity. And in the mouse nerve cells making it, this form of the protein no longer shows up in the cilia where it belongs. When the scientists…

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