BetaII-spectrin gaps and patches emerge from the patterned assembly of the actin/spectrin membrane skeleton in human motor neuron axons
Nahir Guadalupe Gazal, Maria Jose Castellanos-Montiel, Guillermina Bruno, Anna Kristina Franco-Flores, Sarah Lépine, Lale Gursu, Ghazal Haghi, Gilles Maussion, Wolfgang E Reintsch, Fernando D Stefani, Agustín Anastasía, Mariano Bisbal, Ezequiel Axel Gorostiza, Thomas M Durcan, Nicolás Unsain, Pascal · 2026
Read BetaII-spectrin gaps and patches emerge from the patterned assembly of the actin/spectrin membrane skeleton in human motor neuron axons by Nahir Guadalupe Gazal, Maria Jose Castellanos-Montiel, Guillermina Bruno, Anna Kristina Franco-Flores, Sarah Lépine, Lale Gursu, Ghazal Haghi, Gilles Maussion, Wolfgang E Reintsch, Fernando D Stefani, Agustín Anastasía, Mariano Bisbal, Ezequiel Axel Gorostiza, Thomas M Durcan, Nicolás Unsain, Pascal (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-13553066.txt.
Description
Gazal and co-authors report, in a 2026 study, a striking pattern in the inner scaffolding of human motor neuron axons. A repeating lattice of actin and spectrin rings supports the axon, the long fiber that carries signals to muscle. Motor neurons have the longest axons of all and fail first in diseases such as ALS. The team grew human motor neurons from stem cells and imaged the lattice closely.
In the middle stretch of the axons, they found long gaps with no betaII-spectrin alternating with patches where the lattice stood well ordered. A drug that blocks a broad class of kinases triggered the pattern at once, while blocking actin growth stopped patches from forming. The authors propose that as spectrin is drawn into new patches, it drains the zones beside them, which explains the long-range gap-and-patch layout.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Nahir Guadalupe Gazal, Maria Jose Castellanos-Montiel, Guillermina Bruno, Anna Kristina Franco-Flores, Sarah Lépine, Lale Gursu, Ghazal Haghi, Gilles Maussion, Wolfgang E Reintsch, Fernando D Stefani, Agustín Anastasía, Mariano Bisbal, Ezequiel Axel Gorostiza, Thomas M Durcan, Nicolás Unsain, Pascal |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 123 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |