The discovery that Huntington's disease results from a particular mutation of the gene for the protein dubbed "huntingtin" has created great hope that this neurodegenerative movement disorder will soon have effective treatments...
How are short-term memories converted to long-term memories? The process is certain to be complex, and a study in the 23 June issue of Science suggests thetranscription factor NPAS2 may play an important role...
Peter Lansbury, like I and others, has long promulgated
the idea that intermediates in CNS disease-related fibrillogenesis
processes are likely to be pathogenic, whereas mature matted fibrils
(although not desirable) are relatively inert...
Last July, Dale Schenk and colleagues from Elan
Pharmaceuticals reported the remarkable observation that simple
immunization of PDAPP transgenic mice...
Creatine, increasingly popular as a dietary and exercise supplement, has shown the ability to counteract laboratory models of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Huntington's disease, and Parkinson's disease...
The true identity of γ-secretase, the enzyme that frees amyloid-β from its membrane-bound precursor, is one of the holy grails in the search for
the cause of Alzheimer's disease...
The cysteine protease calpain cleaves the cdk5 regulator p35, releasing a 25KD fragment that accumulates in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease. What’s more, Aβ42 is among the factors...
According to a report in today's Science, a productive approach to combating the spongiform encephalopathies such as the transmissible "variant"
Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease may be to attack cells in the spleen where...
The DNA sequence of human chromosome 21 will be published electronically today in Nature (and in print on 18 May). This achievement, by an international
consortium of 62 scientists reveals that chromosome 21...
The neuronal peptide α-synuclein is an important constituent of the Lewy bodies, pathological hallmarks of the Lewy body variant of Alzheimer's disease, as well as of Parkinson's and several other neurodegenerative diseases...
Many researchers believe that the amyloid-β peptide is a culprit in the neurodegenerative process of Alzheimer's disease. Indeed, they can marshal good evidence that the fibrillar form of Aβ kills neurons in a petri dish...
Some of the attention focused on amyloid-β may have to be diverted to yet another peptide product of amyloid precursor protein (APP). Daniel Lu, Edward Koo and colleagues report in the April issue of Nature Medicine that...
Inhibiting cell death proteases, or caspases, can prolong the life of mice with the fatal motor neuron disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Robert Friedlander...