Stochastic growth and ligand–receptor interaction-mediated stabilization generate stereotyped dendritic arbors
Rebecca Shi, Xue Yan Ho, Li Tao, Landon Bayless-Edwards, Caitlin A Taylor, Ting Zhao, Wei Zou, Malcolm Lizzappi, Kelsie Eichel, Tianyi Mao, Kang Shen · 2026
Read Stochastic growth and ligand–receptor interaction-mediated stabilization generate stereotyped dendritic arbors by Rebecca Shi, Xue Yan Ho, Li Tao, Landon Bayless-Edwards, Caitlin A Taylor, Ting Zhao, Wei Zou, Malcolm Lizzappi, Kelsie Eichel, Tianyi Mao, Kang Shen (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-13246438.txt.
Description
Rebecca Shi and co-authors watch nerve branches grow in a tiny worm to learn how their final tree shapes form, in a 2026 study. Dendrites, the branch-like input ends of nerve cells, end up in patterns so regular they look drawn. Yet live growth is messy, full of sprouting and pulling back.
The team focused on one sensory cell in the worm Caenorhabditis elegans, whose wide, flat tree is well mapped. A surface protein pair — a signal and its receptor — was known to guide that tree. Surprisingly, growth ran fine without the signal binding; instead, contact with the signal kept branches from retracting and straying. Shape, it turns out, comes less from steering growth than from steadying it.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Rebecca Shi, Xue Yan Ho, Li Tao, Landon Bayless-Edwards, Caitlin A Taylor, Ting Zhao, Wei Zou, Malcolm Lizzappi, Kelsie Eichel, Tianyi Mao, Kang Shen |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 75 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |