Contact: Wendy Lawton
Wendy_Lawton@brown.edu
401-863-1862
Brown University

Squid Helps Solve Nerve Cell Transport Mystery

Caption: Loligo pealei, the Atlantic squid, has a giant axon that runs the length of its mantle. By injecting designer nanobeads into the giant axon mimicking endogenous cargo, researchers at Brown University and the Marine Biological Laboratory discovered a peptide within amyloid precursor protein that can hitch cargo inside neurons for transport to the synapse.

Credit: Russell Jacobs and Elaine Bearer/Marine Biological Laboratory

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