Diseases, Conditions, Syndromes

Investigating the pathogenesis of rare congenital nerve disorder

A new Northwestern Medicine study has uncovered previously unidentified intracellular mechanisms in the peripheral nervous system that cause Charcot–Marie–Tooth Type 2B disease, a rare congenital disorder that causes ...

Genetics

Researchers find that youthful proteins help nerves regrow

Damaged nerves of the brain, eye, and spinal cord cannot grow back. But specific gene therapies might be able to change this, leading to treatments for paralysis and other forms of nerve damage, UConn Health researchers report ...

Neuroscience

Mechanism decoded: How synapses are formed

Whether in the brain or in the muscles, wherever there are nerve cells, there are synapses. These contact points between neurons form the basis for the transmission of excitation, the communication between neurons. As in ...

page 1 from 22

Axon

An axon or nerve fiber is a long, slender projection of a nerve cell, or neuron, that conducts electrical impulses away from the neuron's cell body or soma.

An axon is one of two types of protoplasmic protrusions that extrude from the cell body of a neuron, the other type being dendrites. Axons are distinguished from dendrites by several features, including shape (dendrites often taper while axons usually maintain a constant radius), length (dendrites are restricted to a small region around the cell body while axons can be much longer), and function (dendrites usually receive signals while axons usually transmit them). All of these rules have exceptions, however.

Some types of neurons have no axon—these are called amacrine cells, and transmit signals from their dendrites. No neuron ever has more than one axon; however in invertebrates such as insects the axon sometimes consists of several regions that function more or less independently of each other. Most axons branch, in some cases very profusely.

Axons make contact with other cells—usually other neurons but sometimes muscle or gland cells—at junctions called synapses. At a synapse, the membrane of the axon closely adjoins the membrane of the target cell, and special molecular structures serve to transmit electrical or electrochemical signals across the gap. Some synaptic junctions appear partway along an axon as it extends—these are called en passant ("in passing") synapses. Other synapses appear as terminals at the ends of axonal branches. A single axon, with all its branches taken together, can innervate multiple parts of the brain and generate thousands of synaptic terminals.

This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA