Newborn neurons routinely break then repair DNA during brain cortex formation, study reveals

Newborn nerve cells must squeeze through crowded, narrow spaces—through dense tissue, past other cells, and between fibers—to reach the areas where they form neural circuits in the brain cortex.

In a study published in Nature, researchers at Kyoto University's Institute for Integrated Cell-Material Sciences (WPI-iCeMS) and their collaborators report that this journey causes widespread DNA damage in neurons, resulting in double-strand breaks in which both strands of the double helix are completely severed. ...