It would seem intuitively appealing that the brain’s billions of minuscule information exchanges—the synapses—may be the main site of destruction in Alzheimer’s disease...
The low-density lipoprotein receptor-related protein, or LRP for short, is part of a family of receptors that mediate the uptake and destruction of extracellular molecules including apolipoprotein E. Previous in vitro experiments have shown...
The proteolytic degradation that accompanies neurodegeneration in animals may be mediated not by apoptotic proteases, but by a group of aspartyl and calcium-dependent proteases, at least in the roundworm, researchers report in today's Nature...
Crumbling microtubules, those slender filaments that aid a variety of cellular processes from cell division to vesicle trafficking, could lead to motor neuron disease...
Evidence has grown over the last few years for the involvement of the tumor suppressor protein p53 in the neuronal cell death that accompanies a variety of neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer's disease...
A gene known to cause a rare form of familial Parkinson's disease codes for 2 separate and opposing enzyme activities, both of which affect the degradation and accumulation of proteins such as α-synuclein, researchers report.
Worries over side effects of γ-secretase inhibitors due to their unwanted effect on Notch cleavage might ease a little with a report demonstrating that the two cleavage events may be regulated at least partly independently. Certain nicastrin mutations affect only Notch cleavage, not AβPP cleavage.
Two papers advance the drive to develop an Alzheimer's vaccine, one looking at the antibody response in some of the Elan trial participants, the other using sophisticated methods to analyze the epitope recognized by antibodies generated in response to Aβ42 immunization.
In today's PNAS early edition, researchers report that transgenic mice devoid of the protein α-synuclein are resistant to MPTP, a neurotoxin that induces Parkinson-like symptoms....