{"id":239189,"date":"2026-06-17T22:05:07","date_gmt":"2026-06-18T03:05:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/06\/developing-brain-cells-routinely-repair-severe-dna-damage-during-migration"},"modified":"2026-06-17T22:05:07","modified_gmt":"2026-06-18T03:05:07","slug":"developing-brain-cells-routinely-repair-severe-dna-damage-during-migration","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/06\/developing-brain-cells-routinely-repair-severe-dna-damage-during-migration","title":{"rendered":"Developing brain cells routinely repair severe DNA damage during migration"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/developing-brain-cells-routinely-repair-severe-dna-damage-during-migration2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Newborn nerve cells must squeeze through crowded, narrow spaces-through dense tissue, past other cells, between fibers-to reach the areas where they form neural circuits in the brain cortex.<\/p>\n<p>In a new study published in <em>Nature<\/em>, researchers at Kyoto University\u2019s 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 where both strands of the double helix are completely severed. While this is the most severe type of DNA damage-capable of causing mutations and cell death-the team surprisingly found that it is a normal, routine feature of brain cortex formation, and a healthy brain quickly repairs it before harm occurs.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe developing brain appears to have evolved to tolerate and repair the neuronal damage efficiently,\u201d says Professor Mineko Kengaku, of WPI-iCeMS, who led the study. \u201cBut understanding the limits of that tolerance-and what happens when repair is incomplete-brings us closer to understanding a range of neurological conditions.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Newborn nerve cells must squeeze through crowded, narrow spaces-through dense tissue, past other cells, between fibers-to reach the areas where they form neural circuits in the brain cortex. In a new study published in Nature, researchers at Kyoto University\u2019s Institute for Integrated Cell-Material Sciences (WPI-iCeMS) and their collaborators report that this journey causes widespread DNA [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":661,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-239189","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239189","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/661"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=239189"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239189\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=239189"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=239189"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=239189"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}