Scientists surprised by rapid nerve repair By Jane Mundy University of Sydney scientists have discovered that the adult nervous system has the capacity to form new connections between nerve cells and muscle within a matter of minutes rather than weeks as was previously thought. Professor Max Bennett and his colleagues Greg Macleod and Paul Dickens in the Department of Physiology and Institute for Biomedical Research have found that these connections, called synapses, appear and disappear continually in as little as 20 minutes and immediately start transmitting impulses.
Synapses occur at the end of the body's nerve terminals.
Each terminal has several hundred synapses one thousandth of a millimetre in diameter which release chemical substances to initiate the function of nerve or muscle cells. Degeneration of synapses associated with a variety of nervous system conditions means that the nerve terminal can no longer perform this function. But this is the first time anyone has been able to demonstrate that new synapses are forming all the time in the mature nervous system over such a surprisingly short time. The team also established a method for recording the function of these new synapses. The importance of their work has been recognised in the April cover story of the prestigious Journal of Neuroscience .