It looks like a discarded husk from which the monumental shaft has sprouted, a tiny scrap of history at the bottom of the 23-storey monster.
We tried to go back the way we had come, but then we heard a loud thump, and a quivering arrow shaft seemed to sprout out of a tree to block our way.
This is in contrast to hippocampal pyramidal cells, which are known to sprout collateral branches from the shaft of dendrites (Dailey and Smith, 1996).
Among the shafts of luxury flats sprouting up along the south bank of the Thames, from Battersea to Bermondsey, there is one new tower unlike the others.
Calpain-2 is a protease that we have previously shown controls neurite shaft consolidation by degrading the machinery needed to promote sprouting [18].
We monitored the surviving axon shaft for up to 1 mm back towards the cell body and saw no sprouting of de novo collateral branches.
In addition to regeneration from the cut ends we also looked for evidence of collateral sprouting, the appearance of de novo branch formation along the primary axon shaft, which is common in the spinal cord after corticospinal29 and sensory neuron damage30,31.
