Image provided by Matthew Conrad, Rodney Johnson Lab
Research funded by the National Institutes of Health and the United States Department of Agriculture
This image shows the brain of a piglet, which is used as a model to understand human brain development. The folded area shown is the hippocampus, an area important for learning and memory. Scientists are looking at how factors such as early-life nutrition or disease affect the development of the hippocampus, in an effort to discover how nutrition might protect the developing brain from harmful effects of inflammation.