Organoids patterned on the dorsal human forebrain consistently contain a set of cells native to the cerebral cortex, and develop along the same trajectory as fetal brains. Could they become the standard for organoid research?
Scientists link this mysterious form of dementia to higher plasma LDL-cholesterol, and to genetic variants in APOB, which encodes the major component of low-density lipoprotein.
Chemotherapy riles microglia, causing neurons to turn down expression of BDNF, a growth factor necessary for myelination. Restoring BDNF signaling on oligodendrocytes spared myelin and memory loss.
The locus incertus fine-tunes hippocampus neural activity to control memory formation in stressful situations. Could a new understanding of these circuits shed light on memory loss in Alzheimer’s?
Viral surfaces attract proteins from the extracellular environment of the person they infect. This corona of host proteins makes the virus more or less infective—and promotes amyloid fibrils.
Thousands of stretches of the genome go undetected by standard short-read sequencing techniques. Unmasking these “dark regions” revealed a potential AD risk variant in the CR1 gene.
Using single-nuclei or cell sorting, three separate research groups sequenced RNA from human postmortem brains. They unveiled AD-associated gene-expression signatures, but disease-related transcriptomes from human microglia were quite different from those in mice.
Antisense Oligonucleotides: Can They Take on ALS, SMA, Prions? Drug Reported to Help Alzheimer’s Patients Sleep Better American Academy of Neurology 2019 Annual Meeting
Data on ASOs, presented recently at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Neurology, depict RNA-based therapies as broadly on the rise in neurodegenerative diseases.
In a new, inducible mouse model, poly(GR) damages mitochondria, but its effect is reversible. In flies, turning off transcription of hexanucleotide expansion protects cells.