This brief highlights an intersection between the brain’s physical milieu and neural signaling, underscoring how tissue mechanics can influence molecular guidance cues. For mental health professionals, this foregrounds the environment-as-biology concept, illustrating a pathway by which early and ongoing bodily context may shape neural connectivity relevant to development and symptom expression.

Article Title: Scientists discover a hidden force that helps wire the brain

Link to Science Daily Mind-Brain News: https://www dot sciencedaily dot com/releases/2026/03/260304184233 dot htm

#brainhealth #neuroscience #neurodev #mentalhealthscience #neuroplasticity

Copy and paste broken link above into your browser and replace "dot" with "." for link to work.

We have to do it this way to avoid display of copyrighted images.

Patterning the mushroom body in the insect brain, the center for associative learning and memory that is modularly organized with spatially tiled dendrites of output neurons (MBONs) and axons of dopaminergic neurons (DANs):

"Slit regulates compartment-specific targeting of dendrites and axons in the Drosophila brain", Deng et al. 2024

Turns out same molecules are used, the Robo receptor and it's ligand Slit, that are used to pattern the nerve cord mediolaterally.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.10.29.620851v1

#neuroscience #DevBio #NeuroDev

Because the search function here doesn't work so well, as I've seen others do, here is a list of hashtags # I'm following (some of which I'm also adding to my profile):

#DevBio
#DevBiol
#Development
#Myoverse (as a possible equivalent of #Myotwitter )
#Morphogenesis
#Regeneration #MuscularDystrophy
#FSHD
#Mechanobiology
#CellBiology
#Neurobiology
#NeuroDev
#Imaging
#biorxiv
#preLights
#Microscopy
#axonguidance