I’m seeing this a lot lately. My cells are turning into neurons:

This is a COS-1 cell, transfected with protein-de-jour. It has two nuclei and looks for all the world like a neuron or astrocyte. The little guy in the top right is a non-transfected cell (I know this because protein-de-jour is tagged with GFP), and looks like a normal COS-1.

We still don’t know exactly what protein-de-jour actually does, but this is a potentially very exciting observation. We have some microarrays of siRNA knockdowns in the process of being, eh, processed, and I have ordered some anti-Tau and anti-MAP2 antibodies. Some primers for RT-PCR are also on the list, to see if these fellows really are neurons, but if anyone would like to make further suggestions I’m all auditory sense organs.