The table of evidence regarding inflammatory and even autoimmune processes in Alzheimer's continues to accumulate in a piecemeal fashion, awaiting experimental breakthroughs to give it direction and a greater following. But accumulate it does, and in this article we summarize some of the recent appetizers...
Researchers have identified over 20,000 different interactions among over 7,000 proteins that are coded in the genome of the fruit fly <em>Drosophila melanogaster</em>, allowing them to create extensive and intricate protein-protein contact maps...
Gerard Drewes and colleagues at Cellzome, Heidelberg, Germany, and the University of Kansas at Lawrence, report in the November 1 Journal of Biological Chemistry online the characterization of a tau kinase called MARK 4...
Researchers at Children's Hospital, Boston, report in the November Nature Neuroscience that non-myelinating Schwann cells (NMSC) are essential for a healthy adult peripheral nervous system, and that this interaction is driven in part by neuregulins released from the neuron...
On 20 October, a group of technology transfer officers from various universities, pharmaceutical companies, research service providers, and the NIH met in Boston to wrestle with the complex intellectual property issues surrounding the availability and use of research tools in AD and other biomedical fields...
A paper in last Friday's Science reports that autosomal-dominant Parkinson's disease can be caused not only by α-synuclein mutations, but also by a triplication of a fragment of DNA containing the gene. This result suggests that dosage of α-synuclein...
The meeting of the Memory Disorders Research Society in Chicago, held 9-11 October, opened with a session on two neurodegenerative syndromes: primary progressive aphasia (PPA) and semantic dementia (SD). Each of these syndromes bears some resemblance to the progression of Alzheimer’s disease...
British researchers report in today’s Science that they have managed to prevent and even reverse clinical manifestations of prion disease. Surprisingly, they did it not by eliminating deposits of abnormal prions, but by...
In today's Science, Cynthia Kenyon and colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco, report that they have generated transgenic nematodes, <em>Caenorhabditis elegans</em>, that live six times longer than normal, the equivalent of about a 500-year lifespan in humans...
In yesterday's Nature, Tobias Baumgart and colleagues shine some light on the fluid dynamics of biomembranes using two-photon microscopy to visualize lipids that separate into coexisting liquid phases, or domains, in giant unilamellar vesicles...
Jeff Rothstein of Johns Hopkins University last Monday chaired a symposium on animal models of neurologic diseases at the American Neurological Association, held in San Francisco from October 19 to 22. Two talks were particularly relevant to this audience...