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Your brain contains billions of nerve cells arranged in patterns that coordinate thought, emotion, behavior, movement and sensation. A complicated highway system of nerves connects your brain to the rest of your body, so communication can occur in split seconds. Think about how fast you pull your hand back from a hot stove. While all the parts of your brain work together, each part is responsible for a specific function - controlling everything from your heart rate to your mood.

"Now a recent breakthrough by the Cambridge neuroscientist and geneticist Seth Grant may provide a third possibility. In a report published in the June 2008 issue of Nature Neuroscience, Grant and his colleagues analyzed synapses in organisms of increasing evolutionary complexity, from single-celled organisms to vertebrates. They found that more advanced organisms also had more complex synapses, allowing neurons to communicate in more complicated ways." Seed

At the center of the discovery is the signaling of rhodopsin to transducin. Rhodopsin is a pigment in the eye that helps detect light. Transducin is a protein (sometimes called "GPCR") which ultimately signals the brain that light is present. The researchers were able to "freeze frame" the chemical communication between rhodopsin and transducin to study how this takes place and what goes wrong at the molecular level in certain disorders. (Science Blog)