The drug selegiline, thought to be neuroprotective, has been used to treat Parkinson's disease for the past 25 years, but a report a few years ago suggested that the
drug could accelerate death in patients taking it...
The cause of Alexander's disease, a very rare, inherited CNS disorder, has been traced to the gene for glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP), according to a report published in this month's Nature Genetics...
Glial cells quietly play a much bigger role than ever
imagined, according to an article in today's issue of Science. Ben Barres and colleagues at Stanford report that astrocytes exert a powerful influence on communication between neurons...
Deleting a critical gene for iron metabolism leads to
selective neurodegeneration, according to a study in this month's Nature Genetics. When researchers
ablated the gene for iron regulatory protein 2 (IRP2), they produced...
Aggregated proteins, or amyloids, are seen in a wide variety of neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer's and Creutzfeldt-Jakob (CJD) disease. Such aggregates are generally considered to be aberrant formations...
Understanding the mechanisms regulating brain wiring has until now relied on biochemical purification approaches in vertebrates and genetic approaches in invertebrates to identify molecular clues. This week...
This week Peter Chien and Jonathan Weissman of the University of California, San Francisco, explain how they used two species of yeast (and an artificial yeast prion protein to investigate how prions jump the species barrier...
It is now generally accepted that new neurons are generated in the adult mammalian brain,
but until now it has been unclear whether or not these neurons are essential for memory formation...
A British and German team has made the surprising discovery that the cell's mitochondria can export peptides into their surrounding environments. Much is known about how mitochondria import proteins, but the
role of this unexpected export mechanism...
The abnormal form of the protein huntingtin may exert
its toxic effects on neurons in Huntington's disease by interfering with a protein essential for gene transcription, according to a study published in this week's issue of Science...
A team at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, has developed a brain-image repository that will make it possible for scientists to freely share fMRI data with colleagues worldwide...
Stem cells from mouse bone marrow can help repair muscle killed in heart attacks, Piero Anversa and
his team at New York Medical College, New York, and colleagues, show in [the 5 April issue of] Nature...
Researchers from France reported success in synthesizing novel compounds that specifically target γ-secretase cleavage of amyloid-β (Aβ) peptide, without affecting the enzyme's cleavage of other substrates...
A major challenge for achieving nerve regeneration following an injury to the adult brain and spine is the presence of numerous proteins that block the growth of axons across the injury site...
A closer look at mitochondria in Alzheimer's disease
confirms that oxidative damage to these cellular power plants is a central feature of the disease, according to a report in the May 1 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience...