This is HUGE, folks!!
My area of interest is protein chemistry, and the opportunities for advancement in treatment of Parkinsons disease that it suggests are enormous.
The use of detergents in the initial synuclein isolation was the big misstep. Hemoglobin is a readily dissociable tetramer protein much like what synuclein turned out to be. We would know little of the enormous knowledge discovered about hemoglobin if detergents were first used in its isolation.
I predict that the next paper from the Selkoe lab will be the three-dimensional structure of alpha synuclein