Tracking Brains

Did you know that hospitals place bands around tiny wrists of newborns that hold important identifying information such as name, sex, mother, and birth date. Researchers at Rockefeller University are placing soft bands around newborn brain cells -- ID tags the babies will keep for their whole life so that scientists can track how they grow and mature, “as a means for better understanding the brain's aging process,” according to a story in Science.

Geneticist Junyue Cao and colleagues calls the process TrackerSci (pronounced "sky"). Newborn cells continue to be produced through life and the kinds of cells being produced greatly vary at different ages. Researchers are hopeful about the study’s long term value.

"The cell is the basic functional unit of our body, so changes to the cell essentially underlie virtually every disease and the aging process," says Cao, head of the Laboratory of Single-Cell Genomics and Population Dynamics at Rockefeller University. "If we can systematically characterize the different cells and their dynamics using this novel technique, we may get a panoramic view of the mechanisms of many diseases and the enigma of aging."

Source: A story published in “Science Daily”