How our brains create breathing rhythm is unique to every breath

Breathing propels everything we do, so its rhythm must be carefully organized by our brain cells, right?Wrong.Every breath we take arises from a disorderly group of neurons — each one like a soloist belting out its song before it unites with other neurons to harmonize on a fresh breath.That ’s the gist ofa UCLA study published March 3 in the online edition of  Neuron.“We were surprised to learn that how our brain cells work together to generate breathing rhythm is different every time we take a breath,” saidJack Feldman, the study ’s senior author, a professor of neurobiology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and a member of the UCLA Brain Research Institute. “Each breath is a like a new song with the same beat.”Feldman and his colleagues studied a small network of neurons called the preB ötzinger complex. Early in his career,Feldman suggested the network was the chief driver of breathing rhythm in the brain — and he named it after a vineyard whose name he had just seen on a bottle of German wine.In 2015, Feldman ’s lab found that surprisingly low levels of activity in the preBötzinger complex were driving breathing rhythm. The discovery left a riddle in its wake: How could such minor cues generate a foolproof breathing rhythm whose failure means death?To answer that puzzle, the UCLA team studied slices of brain tissue from mice and preB ötzinger complex neurons that had been meticulously isolated from the brainstem. By recording the ce...
Source: UCLA Newsroom: Health Sciences - Category: Universities & Medical Training Source Type: news