Earlier this summer, a team of researchers led by Dennis J. Selkoe of Harvard Medical School published a potentially significant finding in Nature suggesting that alpha-synuclein, the protein that aggregates into insoluble fibrils within Lewy bodies in patients with Parkinson’s disease, has been mischaracterized. In contrast previous understanding of alpha-synuclein as a natively unstructured protein, Selkoe and his lab proposed that alpha-synuclein naturally exists as a stable tetramer before destabilization and pathological aggregation. In a push forward in Parkinson’s disease research, a recent independent study by the Petsko-Ringe and Pochapsky laboratories at Brandeis University in Waltham, MA, confirmed the hypothesis by Selkoe and colleagues. The finding is supported by analytical techniques--namely NMR and circular dichroism spectroscopy--different from the Selkoe lab and is published in the October 25 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The fight against glioblastoma, one of the deadliest brain cancers, may have received a big boost thanks to a team of researchers at UCLA’s Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center. In a new study published September 15 in Cancer Discovery, senior author Dr. Paul Mischel, a Jonsson Cancer Center researcher and a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine and of molecular and medicinal pharmacology, and his colleagues discovered that blocking cholesterol uptake into glioma cells can potently kill cancer cell lines and malignant tumors in mice. This novel finding potentially offers a more effective treatment strategy for patients with glioblastomas that have become resistant to traditional chemo and radiotherapies.

UPDATE: A recent independent study by the Petsko-Ringe and Pochapsky laboratories at Brandeis University in Waltham, MA, has confirmed the native tetrameric structure of alpha-synuclein proposed by Selkoe and colleagues.

In a recent study that could radically change our understanding of the pathophysiology of Parkinson’s disease, principal investigator Dennis J. Selkoe at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School discovered that the overall three-dimensional structure of alpha-synuclein, a protein that abnormally aggregates as Lewy bodies in the brains of Parkinson’s patients, has likely been mischaracterized. Prior to this study, scientists had thought that alpha-synuclein in healthy cells is arranged as a randomly coiled chain with no apparent orderly structure. Selkoe’s lab, however, has shown otherwise in their study published online August 14 in Nature.

Researchers from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences have concluded a study which demonstrates that regular exercise modifies the brain environment, and could help prevent damage associated with diseases such as Alzheimer's.

A picture of "calm", Buddhist monks - who've spent tens of thousands of hours of their lives meditating - have been shown to have different patterns of brain activity from non-meditators, and subsequent research has proven these types of brain activity patterns are associated with more positive moods.

Researchers at the Scripps Research Institute had some unexpected findings when searching for genes that influence the amount of amyloid that deposits as brain plaques in Alzheimer's disease. Through an extensive gene hunt, the team identified three candidate genes that seemed to offer protection in mice from brain amyloid accumulation and deposition.

Some disorders of the brain are obvious — the massive death of brain cells after a stroke, the explosion in the growth of cells that marks a tumor. Other disorders, such as autism, schizophrenia and mental retardation show no physical signs of damage and are believed to be caused by problems in how brain cells communicate with one another.

Researchers from California Institute of Technology have recently described how two different neural subtypes act as a gate that controls the outflow of "fear" from the amygdala region of our brains.

In an early step toward letting severely paralyzed people speak with their thoughts, University of Utah researchers translated brain signals into words using two grids of 16 microelectrodes implanted beneath the skull but atop the brain.

“We have been able to decode spoken words using only signals from the brain with a device that has promise for long-term use in paralyzed patients who cannot now speak,” says Bradley Greger, an assistant professor of bioengineering.

Because the method needs much more improvement and involves placing electrodes on the brain, he expects it will be a few years before clinical trials on paralyzed people who cannot speak due to so-called “locked-in syndrome.” The Journal of Neural Engineering’s September issue is publishing Greger’s study showing the feasibility of translating brain signals into computer-spoken words.

A neurodegenerative disease affecting between 1 and 2 percent of people over the age of 65, Parkinson's disease can be difficult to diagnose as no definitive test exists. Its symptoms, which include tremors, sluggish movement, muscle stiffness and difficulty with balance, can be caused by many other things, including other neurological disorders, toxins and even medications.

Up until about twenty years ago, late-onset Parkinson's disease was thought to be caused exclusively from environmental factors. Even after researchers determined the disease to have genetic components - previous studies had only helped to confirm that genes previously had been found to confer "risk".

This new study took 18 years to build, and studied more than 4,000 individual DNA samples - half from unrelated patients with the disease, and the other half from healthy 'controls'. Patients from whom samples were taken were tracked for at least a dozen years after their initial diagnoses to assure that they indeed had Parkinson’s.