TY - INPR JF - Cellular and Molecular Life Sciences ID - discovery10118446 UR - https://doi.org/10.1007/s00018-020-03724-3 Y1 - 2020/12/20/ TI - Walking the line: mechanisms underlying directional mRNA transport and localisation in neurons and beyond N1 - This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. AV - public A1 - Abouward, R A1 - Schiavo, G N2 - Messenger RNA (mRNA) localisation enables a high degree of spatiotemporal control on protein synthesis, which contributes to establishing the asymmetric protein distribution required to set up and maintain cellular polarity. As such, a tight control of mRNA localisation is essential for many biological processes during development and in adulthood, such as body axes determination in Drosophila melanogaster and synaptic plasticity in neurons. The mechanisms controlling how mRNAs are localised, including difusion and entrapment, local degradation and directed active transport, are largely conserved across evolution and have been under investigation for decades in diferent biological models. In this review, we will discuss the standing of the feld regarding directional mRNA transport in light of the recent discovery that RNA can hitchhike on cytoplasmic organelles, such as endolysosomes, and the impact of these transport modalities on our understanding of neuronal function during development, adulthood and in neurodegeneration KW - Axonal transport · Vesicular trafc · Neurodegeneration ER -