UC Irvine applauded for breakthrough

UC Irvine continues to amaze.

The university is churning out some of the most academically-promising students in the country.

Now UCI has a top-rate literature program that includes one of the best literary journals in the country: Faultline.

And it’s making headlines in sports, too, with the men’s volleyball team recently winning the NCAA title and the baseball team reaching the World Series.

But perhaps the best work the university does — and most under-the-radar — is in research.

Witness staff writer Joseph Serna’s Wednesday story (“Discovery leads to schizophrenia questions”), which relates how researchers found an unfamiliar link between auditory brain cells that may explain certain psychological problems such as schizophrenia, and may ultimately lead to breakthroughs that would help those who suffer from such conditions.

Prior to the discovery, the axon, which connects the brain cells, was thought to serve only as a connector. Any transmission problems happened at the sending or receiving end. Not so anymore, researchers say. Problems can occur along the conductor.

Raju Metherate, the author of the study that appeared in last Sunday’s Nature Neuroscience magazine, put it this way: Imagine speaking into a landline telephone. When a person speaks into the handset, the sound waves are transmitted into electrical energy, which flow through the phone cords to the handset the other person is listening to. When the electrical signal gets there, it is converted into the sound we hear coming through the earpiece.

Metherate’s team discovered that besides the volume controls on either party’s phone, the brain also has a volume control on the phone cord (axon) itself.

We’ll get to the upshot: A schizophrenic may have a faulty axon.

Prior to researchers’ find doctors may have been looking in the wrong place when treating those with disorders of the brain.

Of course, any cure, if at all, is years away.

But it appears we’re moving in the right direction.

Hoorah to UCI for that.