the latest in microbiology:

• whew that was a close one! glad that was better defined \ alpha synuclein may be very important
• cart before the horse [again]
• why don't we always use human cells - we may have started as bacteria but we are more than that now
• never felt comfortable with targeting something about which we didn't know the function
• glad they know more

Thank you Paula.

Thanks Paula.

I am glad they know more about it! So alpha-syn seems to form a tetramer (four single units forming some kind of a structure which makes it easier to visualize it as a chaperone protein and/or whatever else it does.

This new finding does not take away any of the information we already know about alpha-syn. Mutations in alpha-syn could still prevent tetramer formation, monomers could be aggregating to form oliogomers...... and eventually leading to neuro inflammation.

Alpha- Syn is clearly an important protein in the neuron and when it fails to do its job (whatever it may be!), there is a big problem called PD.

Thanks for posting this Paula.

Girija

I posted a short piece on this on Parkinson's Movement **

You can also comment and ask questions there, we would appreciate your opinions.

Sara

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

This does look like a huge discovery, that will change a lot of things...... as always, we have to cross our fingers, and toes, and hope that it proves to be as medically useful as it looks to be..... if it can be used to find a treatment that stops lewy bodies forming......... let's hope.....

http://www.boston.com/business/healt...for_treatment/

Sara cannot post links yet, so here is a link to their post.

Jean