“Some of the axons work well, and others stop working,” said Huguenard.

“That
failure can have catastrophic results, because this seems to be a critical control point
in some epileptic networks.”

Epilepsy develops when neuron's signaling becomes dysregulated, according to past

research. Neurons direct many parallel processes in the brain at the same time, all
the time. Despite constantly shooting off signals, neurons normally don’t fire in
synchrony. Built-in safety mechanisms keep this from happening, but when these
measures fail, many neurons fire together and seizures can occur. A
recent study from Huguenard’s lab, led by Christopher Makinson, PhD, suggested
that the loss of a single gene in this regulatory network is enough to generate
seizures.