Surprising as it may seem, presenilins—the enzymes at the heart of the proteolytic γ-secretase complex that unleashes Aβ peptides—are essential to prevent age-related cognitive deficits and neurodegeneration...
Ubiquitin may be everywhere, but when it comes to polyglutamine diseases like Huntington’s (HD), SUMO-1 (small ubiquitin-like modifier 1) may have just as much clout...
The science policy news service Washington Fax reported on March 30 that the Coalition of Hope, a collection of advocacy groups brought together by the Alzheimer's Association, seeks to raise NIH AD funding from $699 million to...
Everyone knows that smoking is bad for you. But there is some evidence, both epidemiological and molecular, that smokers are at reduced risk for neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's (AD) and Parkinson's (PD)...
How do Schwann cells know how much myelin to wrap around an axon during development? It's not a trivial problem—a small difference in myelin thickness can change signal transduction speed through the axon, with potentially devastating consequences...
As part of the tangled web of pathology that leads to Alzheimer’s disease, inflammation is associated with local immune responses. For example, recent data indicate that both AD patients and elderly healthy people have...
A loss of activity in areas of the brain that typically fire up when our brains are at rest may prove to be an accurate diagnostic marker for the earliest stages of Alzheimer's disease...
A multi-institutional collaboration has vaccinated rhesus monkeys (<em>Macaca mulatta</em>) against the Aβ peptide in an effort to establish a more human-like animal model than mice for use in vaccination studies...
Researchers who follow the ups and downs of protein expression in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) may well think they are being taken on a roller coaster ride. Early on, many proteins are...
A report in press in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, published online February 24, adds to the growing body of evidence that traces the etiology of Parkinson's disease to the mitochondria...