Image of the Day: Lysosomes Go Traveling

To chew up waste in far-reaching dendritic spines, lysosomes are trafficked sometimes hundreds of microns away from the cell bodies of neurons in rats.

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Dissociated rat hippocampal neuron (red) in culture with fluorescently labeled lysosomes (yellow) scattered throughout distal sitesMARISA GOO, GENTRY PATRICK/UC SAN DIEGO Scientists have determined that lysosomes, prompted by synaptic activity in the dissociated hippocampal neurons of rats, are sent to distal places in dendrites, which receive input from other cells.

See M.S. Goo et al., “Activity-dependent trafficking of lysosomes in dendrites and dendritic spines,” The Journal of Cell Biology, 216:2499, 2017.

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