Golgi helps shape dendrites

The Feng shui of Golgi arrangement helps give neurons their distinctive shapes, say Bing Ye, Ye Zhang, Yuh Nung Jan, and colleagues (University of California, San Francisco, CA). Dendrites, the group finds, rely on the secretory pathway for growth more than axons do.

A young neuron is a mass of tiny neurites, one of which becomes an axon while the others form dendrites. To find the blueprints for these very different architectures, Jan's group identified mutations that hampered the growth of dendrites but not axons. Several of their mutants impaired the transport of secretory membrane vesicles from the ER to the Golgi.

The secretory block reorganized the small, isolated stacks of Golgi —called outposts—that are found predominately in dendrites. When outposts inched forward, dendrites...