RESEARCH NEWS 2015-01-30 Research News Corticospinal motor neurons are the motor system’s foreman, according to Hande Özdinler of the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. They listen to what the brain wants, and then tell lower motor neurons to do it. I
RESEARCH NEWS 2015-01-30 Research News Biochemical markers in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) are proving increasingly useful in clinical diagnosis and research, but having people agree to a lumbar puncture can be a challenge, particularly in the United States. Just the thought of that
RESEARCH NEWS 2015-01-30 Research News Researchers have identified which enzymes axons use to trigger their own demise. Reporting in the January 15 Cell, first author Jing Yang and colleagues at Rockefeller University in New York found that mitogen-activated protein (MAP) kinases
RESEARCH NEWS 2015-02-06 Research News Because it goes hand-in-hand with neurodegenerative disease, researchers would like a reliable way to image inflammation in the brain. They have used PET tracers that target the mitochondrial translocator protein. TSPO ramps up in microglia
RESEARCH NEWS 2015-02-06 Research News Researchers have published the crystal structure of part of the SorLA neuronal sorting receptor, a known genetic risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease. Reporting in the February 2 Nature Structural and Molecular Biology, scientists led by Juni
CONFERENCE COVERAGE 2015-02-06 Conference Coverage From January 14 to 16, the ninth annual Human Amyloid Imaging (HAI) conference unfolded in Miami Beach, Florida, with a record attendance of 340 scientists—and arguably a curious little identity problem. HAI began in 2007, soon after t
RESEARCH NEWS 2015-02-06 Research News With their ability to quickly fine-tune gene expression, microRNAs are a natural fit to regulate synaptic activity in response to the changing needs of the nervous system. Few of these micro-managers are known to work at the presynaptic side
CONFERENCE COVERAGE 2015-02-09 Conference Coverage At the 9th Human Amyloid Imaging Conference, held January 14 to 16 in Miami Beach, Florida, 19 presentations by scientists at six different centers showcased data gathered thus far with T807. Now called AV1451, it is the most widely st
CONFERENCE COVERAGE 2015-02-10 Conference Coverage How does tau PET fit in with more-established biomarkers of Alzheimer’s disease, such as the concentration of tau and phosopho-tau in the cerebrospinal fluid? For amyloid PET, the correlation with CSF Aβ was made early on (Fagan et al.
CONFERENCE COVERAGE 2015-02-12 Conference Coverage Usually in PET development, before a new tracer is explored in many people and applied in clinical trials, it undergoes extensive validation to determine precisely where it is binding, and kinetic modeling studies to determine how it b
RESEARCH NEWS 2015-02-12 Research News Just kidding, emigration won’t fix this problem. Recently, out of Iceland, came news of an amyloid precursor protein variant that protected a lucky 1 percent of the islanders from Alzheimer’s disease. Alas, far fewer Americans stand to inher
RESEARCH NEWS 2015-02-13 Research News A variant of the TMEM106B gene, originally discovered in people with frontotemporal lobar degeneration with TDP-43 pathology, influences the TDP-43 protein in other neurodegenerative diseases too, according to a study in the February 4 Neuro