A team led by Thomas Meade at the California Institute of Technology has developed an MRI contrast agent that is activated only in the presence of a target gene, according to a report in the March issue of Nature Biotechnology...
Circumstantial evidence has accumulated over the last decade that there are pluripotent stem cells in the hippocampus of humans and other animals. Much hope has been attached to these heretofore elusive cells because...
The Ts65Dn mouse developed at the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, has the signature skull and facial deformities of Down's syndrome, strengthening its case as a model for the human syndrome...
Previous studies have shown that women who take estrogen reduce their risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease. But can estrogen also benefit women who already have been diagnosed with the disease?...
Memory deficits due to NMDA receptor loss in the hippocampus can be overcome by enriched environments, according to a report from Joe Tsien and his Princeton colleagues in the March issue of Nature Neuroscience...
Several neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and Lewy body disease, are characterized by abnormal neuronal inclusions of α-synuclein, one of the brain's synaptic proteins...
One part of the answer to this question may involve the yeast nuclear protein Sir2, according to a study in tommorow's issue of Nature. Leonard Guarente, Shin-ichiro Imai and their coworkers at MIT say the protein is regulated by NAD...
Genetic tests based on polymerase chain reactions often fail to detect mutations when both a mutant and a wildtype gene exist in the genome. The key to "unmasking" the mutant allele...
A caspase protease in the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) may have a hand in cell death in Alzheimer's, according to a report in the January 6 issue of Nature. The caspases appear to play critical roles in various apoptotic mechanisms...
The essential "prion-determining" portion of a prion protein can be removed and fused to a wholly separate protein, creating a new prion with the essential prion qualities of state changing and heritability...
Some of the earliest cellular changes of the trinucleotide repeat disorder spinocerebellar ataxia type 1 (SCA1) appear only one day after the mutant gene that causes the disorder begins to be expressed...
As with many neurodegenerative diseases, viruses have waxed and waned in popularity as possible causative agents in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, known as Lou Gehrig's disease in the U.S.)...
The green light has been given for Mark Tuszynski and his colleagues from the University of California, San Diego, the Salk Institute, and UC Davis to start a Phase I (safety) trial of nerve growth factor (NGF) gene therapy for early onset Alzheimer's...
A paper in today's Science offers a candidate pathway for inflammatory processes in Alzheimer's disease; the pathway uses the CD40 receptor on microglia and is upregulated by Aβ...