Nanobiology Notes

Synaptic Vesicles - Message in a bottle

Previous blog entries have covered what Neurotransmitters are, and how synaptic receptors use these molecules as triggers for complex actions once they have crossed the synapse. This blog entry explores the other side of the synaptic cleft, where the neurotransmitters are stored and released.

Nature has developed some amazing machinery to make synapses fire quickly. Relying on the cell nucleus to generate the molecules that act as neurotransmitters when they are needed would be far too slow to achieve the kind of speed required to power thought. Instead, these molecules are made ahead of time, before they are needed, and are kept bottled up in spherical containers called 'vesicles', waiting for the instant that they need to be released. The picture that is evolving on how synapses actually manage this feat is quite fascinating. And, once again, that super cool molecule called 'clathrin' plays a major role...

From http://www.hhmi.org/research/investigators/sudhof.h…

Neurotransmitters - molecular messages

You often hear about neurotransmitters in the news and in science magazines in a kind of off-hand way that assumes everyone must surely know what these things are. But, um, what are they, exactly?

From Sandra Ackerman's book "Discovering the Brain": To be recognized as a neurotransmitter, a chemical compound must satisfy six conditions: It must be

synthesized in the neuron, stored there, released in sufficient quantity to bring about some physical effect; when administered experimentally, the compound must demonstrate the same effect that it brings about in living tissue; there must be receptor sites specific to this compound on the postsynaptic membrane, as well as a means for shutting off its effect, either by causing its swift decomposition or by reuptake, absorbing it back into the cell.

OK, well, what about hormones? They're chemical messengers too - how are hormones different from neurotransmitters? A hormone, by definition, is a compound produced by an endocrine…

It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.

-- Mark Twain

So far, most of the posts in this blog have been focused on building a 'bottom-up' understanding of how the brain works - from how DNA works up to how individual neurons work. Lots of good science to base all of this stuff on. It is difficult to go further 'up the stack' in this way, however. How do neurons work together to do useful things? How are small-scale networks of neurons structured and how do the neurons interact in order for us to do simple things like rhythmically tap a finger?

Are we there yet?
Every decade or two the scientific community gets wildly optimistic that we will be able to fully understand how cognition works and be able to replicate the process in some non-biological system. It's been named many things over the years - cybernetics, artificial intelligence, computational intelligence, cognitive computing (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence for a nice overview). And yet, with all of the money tha…

Beta Rhythm (Music of the Mind)

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