A brain cell makes a few short strands of RNA, wraps them in a bubble of membrane and lets the bubble go. It drifts out into the fluid around the cells. Another cell takes it in, and the genes inside that cell start working differently.
No wire is involved. Nothing sparks.
Aleksey Shatskikh, a Candidate of Biological Sciences and senior researcher at the Laboratory of Functional Genomics at the Koltsov Institute of Developmental Biology, described this near the end of a long talk about non-coding RNAs. These are RNA molecules that never get read out into protein. They do their work as RNA, and a lot of that work is deciding which genes switch on. He gave the bubble-mailing idea a couple of minutes, as one more thing worth knowing about these molecules. He called the bubbles vesicles.
His example of where the mail gets delivered is the brain, and that changes how a brain looks on the page. Everyone learns that neurons talk by electricity. Here is a second line running alongside the first. What arrives is not a message to pass along. It is a change to how the receiving cell runs, down to its biochemistry and the work of its genes.
Different brain cells can exchange information through non-coding RNAs, and this changes how those nerve cells work: their biochemistry, the work of their genes, and much else.
разные клетки мозга могут обмениваться информацией при помощи некодирующих РНК, и таким образом меняется работа этих нервных клеток, меняется их биохимия, работа генов и многое другое.
— Aleksey Shatskikh, Scientific Russia, 22:05
Shatskikh calls it "a whole other powerful layer" of signalling. He names it chemical communication, with non-coding RNA as one part of it.
Other labs have been watching these parcels travel between neurons. A study in Advanced Science in September 2026 followed microRNA carried in vesicles from one neuron to another. The RNA helped regulate how synapses form. When the researchers emptied the RNA out of the vesicles, the synaptic changes in the receiving neuron's dendrites did not happen.
The host guessed that this kind of signalling must be very old. Shatskikh agreed, and the age is the surprising part. By current understanding, electrical signalling in neurons appeared later in evolution than chemical signalling. Simple organisms get by mostly on chemical messages, which are the basic mechanism. The electrical spike came afterwards.
Shatskikh's word for the electrical system is "a superstructure": a narrow specialisation that neurons built on top of the older chemical exchange.
So the signal that gets all the attention, the spike that runs along the axon, may be the newcomer. The slow old habit of leaving a note in the fluid and letting a neighbour read it is still running underneath.
