JoAnn Buchanan, Ph.D., was deep into the data.
One click at a time, she scanned through the branching, twisting 3D shapes of mouse brain cells on her computer screen.
And then Buchanan, a scientist at the Allen Institute, saw something weird: a kind of brain cell she wasn’t familiar with.
“They’re just such beautiful cells, they’re so beautiful. And I just became obsessed,” Buchanan said.
These brain cells, smaller than neurons but just as complex, are known as oligodendrocyte precursor cells, or OPCs for short.
“I saw something in them which had never been seen before,” Buchanan said.
She doesn’t mean that metaphorically. She literally saw something inside this OPC that nobody else had spotted — machinery that is able to digest parts of other cells.
