A team of researchers at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne are leveraging leading-edge imaging tools to gain a better understanding of Parkinson’s disease and its underlying cause: an accumulation of protein alpha-synuclein. The team’s efforts are described in a recent article published in Acta Neuropathologica Communications.
Parkinson’s is one of the most common diseases caused by neurodegeneration, second to Alzheimer’s in frequency and number of cases. It’s a condition that can cause certain types of neurons in the brain to weaken and deteriorate. This can lead to a range of hallmark symptoms, such as tremors and other changes to a person’s physical and motor abilities.
Specifically, researchers have so far detected that part of the root cause of Parkinson’s disease is the build up of the protein alpha-synuclein in neurons. As these proteins build up, it can inhibit the function of neurons over time, leading to hallmark Parkinson’s symptoms. As a result, researchers are constantly looking for new ways to understand this protein and their role in Parkinson’s disease.
As part of the study published in Acta Neuropathologica Communications, researchers have pooled their expertise and resources to focus specifically on how this protein affects neuronal metabolic processes and what this might mean for our understanding of Parkinson’s disease. They used leading-edge tools that bring together spatial resolution and mass spectrometry to enable researchers to create detailed maps of what is happening at a sub-cellular level when it comes to metabolism in neuronal cells. The combined imaging technique is called NanoSIMS (Nanoscale Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry). The team also leveraged stable isotope labeling to see differences in tissue with a high degree of clarity.
To test their imaging tool, researchers used rats with an overexpression of alpha-synuclein in one hemisphere in their brain compared to the other “control” hemisphere that was considered healthy. Overall, researchers found that the alpha-synuclein protein led to a higher usage of macromolecules like carbon, suggesting that this protein puts more pressure on neuronal cells.
Sources: Science Daily; Acta Neuropathologica Communications
