Neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s disease are characterized by abnormal accumulation of protein tangles/minuscule clumps that have drawn neuroscientists to dive deep into the pathogenesis of other such brain diseases and their tangled-protein signatures.
“Each of these diseases has a unique protein tangle, or fibril, associated with it. These proteins associated with diseases have their shapes and behaviors.” “We now have a promising new lead. It could point towards a common thread linking a range of neurodegenerative diseases and could open the way to new interventions,” says Anthony Fitzpatrick, PhD, principal investigator at Columbia’s Zuckerman Institute and also an assistant professor of biochemistry and molecular biophysics at Columbia University Irving Medical Center and a member of Columbia’s Taub Institute for Research on Alzheimer’s Disease and the Aging Brain.
“We have found that a protein called TMEM106B can form fibrils, and this behavior was not known before. This protein is a core component of lysosomes and endosomes, which are organelles that clean up the junk that builds up in our cells as we get older,” says Xinyu Xiang, formerly a member of the Fitzpatrick lab at the Zuckerman Institute and now a graduate student at Stanford University’s Department of Structural Biology.
The disease helps explore further treatment choices for various other neurodegenerative diseases.