Scientists at the University of British Columbia have discovered a new type of brain cell they believe plays a critical role in humans’ ability to recognize and remember objects.
The research, published this week in the journal Nature Communications, dubbed the highly-specialized neurons “ovoid cells.”
The cells activate every time we encounter something new, kicking off a process that sees the information stored in our memory — allowing us to recognize the items months or even years later.
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Dr. Mark Cembrowski, the study’s senior author and an associate professor of cellular and physiological sciences at UBC, said the discovery opens exciting doors in the fight against memory-related diseases and disorders.
“We can study these cells to understand from a new perspective Alzheimer’s disease spread in the brain,” he said.
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“This is biology’s cookbook with which the way Alzheimer’s disease operates, and we can potentially leverage those biological principles to gain new insight and understanding and potentially get new treatments based upon how the nervous system itself works.”
The researchers say the cells are found in the brain’s hippocampus in comparatively small numbers.
Study lead author and PhD student Adrienne Kinman discovered their unique properties while analyzing a sample from a mouse brain.
“When a mouse sees an object for the first time, these cells turn on and stay on for a long period of time,” Cembrowski explained.
“However, if we wait a day and we show the animal that same object, these cells no longer respond, which is really wild.”
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The researchers say it appears the neurons have a unique form of cellular memory, allowing them to recognize if they’ve encountered the object before.
He added that research has shown the cells can also become either too active or not active enough. Those findings, he said, could open the door to new treatments for brain diseases like Alzheimer’s or epilepsy.
The team says the discovery of a new type of cell so many years after humans began studying the brain suggests there may still be other types of brain cells science has yet to find.
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