NEUROSCIENCE

What Makes Human Brain Cells Unique?

New findings reveal distinctive electrical properties of human neurons that

may give us a boost in computing power
By ​Diana Kwon​ on October 18, 2018
 ​ laus Boller Getty Images
Credit: K

Spanish neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal revolutionized the study of the

brain when he observed neurons for the first time. His investigations, now more
than 100 years old, revealed intricate details of nerve cells in many different
animals, including humans—rootlike dendrites attached to bulbous cell bodies,
from which extend long, slender axons.

Cajal’s examinations also revealed dendrites (via which nerve cells receive signals
from other neurons) were much longer in humans than in rodents and other
animals, even other non-human primates. A new study, published this week in ​Cell,​
shows that in people these antennalike projections also have distinct electrical
properties that may help explain how the brain processes arriving information.

Scientists have been meticulously studying dendrites in the decades since Cajal’s
initial observations. Still, “the only thing we really knew about human dendrites
was their anatomy,” Massachusetts Institute of Technology neuroscientist ​Mark
Harnett​ says. “There was a lot of potential for human dendrites to be doing
something different because of their length, but there was no published work, as far
as I know, on their actual electrical properties.”

So Harnett and his colleagues set out to investigate whether the length of
dendrites affected electrical signals transmitted through them. With the help
of a neurologist, Sydney Cash of Massachusetts General Hospital, they were
able to obtain brain tissue that had been removed from epilepsy patients
undergoing routine surgery to help allay seizures—a procedure in which
physicians routinely remove part of the temporal cortex to get to the
hippocampus, a structure deep inside the brain where seizures typically
originate. Once the research team obtained the resected tissue, they then
hurriedly transported it back to the lab, where they sliced and tested the
samples. Because the human tissue could only be kept alive for a few days,
experiments usually continued for 48 hours straight. “We would work in shifts
and go home and sleep then come back and keep recording,” Harnett says.

In total, Harnett’s team examined brain slices from nine patients and 30 rats.
To study the electrical properties of the neurons within these samples, the
researchers used patch-clamp recording, which involves attaching small glass
needles to nerve cells to measure their activity. These probes revealed that
although human and rodent dendrites shared basic features, such as the
ability to produce an action potential, there were some key differences
between the two species. When the researchers injected an electrical current
into the neurons’ dendrites, they found much less activity made its way to the
somas (cell bodies) in human cells than to the rodent somas. “That
immediately suggests that [signaling is] much more compartmentalized [in
human dendrites],” Harnett says. “That means whatever local processing
happens in the dendrites can happen independently of what's going on in the
soma.”

Harnett compares these dendritic compartments with the tumblers in a lock:

As locks get more complicated, you get more tumblers, and you need a more
sophisticated key to unlock it. In a similar way, human dendrites may require
very specific signals to strongly influence the soma. Ultimately, the properties
of human dendrites could endow neurons with more computing power than
those of rodents. Because signals are more easily transmitted from one end of
the cell to the other in rats, it suggests that the processing of electrical signals
in these animals’ dendrites are less compartmentalized, Harnett notes.

Michael Hausser​, a neuroscientist at University College London who was not

involved in this work, says this new study supports decades of research on
animals—mostly rodents—that have shown dendrites can segregate signals in
this way. Based on those observations, he says, scientists expected there would
be a greater degree of compartmentalization in the dendrites of human
neurons than many other animals,’ because they are much longer. And
subsequent work with computational models suggested having more
independent processing compartments within dendrites could provide greater
computational power within a single cell.

Still, the actual computations dendrites carry out—and the behaviors linked to
the activity in these neuronal branches—are still unclear. But scientists have
some ideas: One possibility, Hausser says, is the electrical activity within the
dendrites could detect the simultaneous occurrence of separate signals—say,
incoming information about the smell and shape of a rose. In addition to
identifying different inputs to the neuron, dendrites could also be involved in
binding this information together and storing it.

Of course, these ideas have yet to be tested experimentally. But Harnett’s

study “represents a first step in a new era of exploring our own dendrites,”
Hausser says. “And that's incredibly important for understanding how human
brains work.”

Javier DeFelipe​, a neuroscientist at the Cajal Institute in Madrid who was not
involved in the work, says this study points to the importance of studying
human tissue. Many neuroscience studies rely on rodent work, but there are
several ways the animals’ brain differs from humans. This work shows that in
addition to size differences, there are also differences in the way the human
organ functions. “Our brain is not a bigger mouse brain,” DeFelipe says.

Source: ​https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-makes-human-brain-cells-unique/