You read a sentence, remember a familiar face, then turn to another thought. Behind all of that activity, your brain also has a housekeeping problem: what to do with proteins that can become harmful when they accumulate.
Those proteins need an exit. But tracing their journey out of the brain has proved surprisingly difficult.
Now, researchers at University College London have identified a previously undocumented network of tiny channels that could fill in part of the map.
In mice, fluorescently labeled proteins entered these channels and traveled towards the brain's surface. Similar structures appeared in human brain tissue removed during surgery, raising the possibility that we share this clearance route.
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