Ion Channel Functions in Early Brain Development

Early Brain Development

Media coverage of early brain development not only has focused public attention on early childhood but also has contributed to misunderstanding of developmental neuroscience research. This article critically summarizes current research in developmental neuroscience that is pertinent to the central claims of media accounts of early brain development, including (a) scientific understanding of for...

Convergence of ion channel genome content in early animal evolution.

Multicellularity has evolved multiple times, but animals are the only multicellular lineage with nervous systems. This fact implies that the origin of nervous systems was an unlikely event, yet recent comparisons among extant taxa suggest that animal nervous systems may have evolved multiple times independently. Here, we use ancestral gene content reconstruction to track the timing of gene fami...

Ion channel activity drives ion channel expression.

Human PIEZO1 Ion Channel Functions as a Split Protein

PIEZO1 is a mechanosensitive eukaryotic cation-selective channel that rapidly inactivates in a voltage-dependent manner. We previously showed that a fluorescent protein could be encoded within the hPIEZO1 sequence without loss of function. In this work, we split the channel into two at this site and asked if coexpression would produce a functional channel or whether gating and permeation might ...

Mapping Early Brain Development in Autism

Although the neurobiology of autism has been studied for more than two decades, the majority of these studies have examined brain structure 10, 20, or more years after the onset of clinical symptoms. The pathological biology that causes autism remains unknown, but its signature is likely to be most evident during the first years of life when clinical symptoms are emerging. This review highlight...