Nerve cell why is it shaped like that

Nucleolus - produces ribosomes necessary for translation of genetic information into proteins Nissl Bodies - groups of ribosomes used for protein synthesis. Endoplasmic reticulum ER - system of tubes for transport of materials within cytoplasm. Can have ribosomes rough ER or no ribosomes smooth ER. With ribosomes, the ER is important for protein synthesis. Golgi Apparatus - membrane-bound structure important in packaging peptides and proteins including neurotransmitters into vesicles.

Mitochondria - produce energy to fuel cellular activities. Happy st Birthday to the Golgi apparatus! In , the famous neuroanatomist Camillo Golgi reported his discovery of a ribbon-like apparatus inside neurons of the cerebellum. This structure now bears his name as the "Golgi apparatus. Color a neuron or several neurons online!

Try the Neuron Review Test. Requires the Adobe Acrobat Reader. Answers to the Neuron Review Test. Build a Neuron - you must have the Shockwave plug-in for your browser. Get the Shockwave plug-in. Discovery of molecules that sculpt nerve shape will assist in understanding nerve cell function and neurological disease.

Nerve cell shapes vary according to the number, branching and disposition of their projections or dendrites, collectively known as arborization. This determines their capacity for interacting with their environment and with other nerve cells or neurons, hence their computational ability and roles.

Knowing how such shapes are determined is important for understanding nerve cell function and neurological disease. Further, these traditional approaches could not isolate neurons of one specific type from others, thus failing to pinpoint what makes specific brain circuits assemble so precisely in the normal brain and what drives the assembly aberrations seen in disease.

The new approach overcomes this hurdle and allows scientists to precision-profile specific types of neurons and their subcompartments directly in the mouse brain. Macklis and his team homed in on so-called callosal projection neurons, which connect the two hemispheres of the brain and enable communication between them. To identify the distinct subcellular parts of these neurons, the team genetically labeled the nuclei or the axons and their growth cones with fluorescent proteins.

To their surprise, the growth cones contained hundreds of unique and highly enriched RNA transcripts and proteins not even detected above noise in the cell body. If borne out in further studies, the findings could upend long-standing dogma in neuroscience, according to the researchers. There were also all kinds of other molecules involved in cell maintenance and growth that one would not expect to see in the growth cone. The molecular profile of this growing axon looked more like a self-sufficient cell than a copper wire carrying information from the nucleus.

The findings may reshape the way neuroscientists approach the nervous system in the future, propelling them to probe the axon for valuable clues. The network of astrocytes would thus constitute a non-synaptic transmission system superimposed on the neuronal system to play a major role in modulating neuronal activities.

Funding for this site is provided by readers like you. Function by Level of Organization. Functional classification:. Morphological classification based on the number of extensions from the cell body:.