News by Subject Chemistry & Physics

A team led by Case Western Reserve University medical researchers has developed a potential treatment method for Pelizaeus-Merzbacher disease (PMD), a fatal neurological disorder that produces severe movement, motor and cognitive dysfunction in children. It results from genetic mutations that prevent the body from properly making myelin, the protective insulation around nerve cells.

Mice that received an injection of a new experimental drug, TAT-DP-2, after a stroke had smaller areas of damage, and their long-term neurological function was better than that of untreated animals.

Mount Sinai neuroscience researchers discover a novel potassium channel activator which acts as a potential anticonvulsant.

Some neuron types are particularly prone to Alzheimer's, and a new study suggests that those neurons are vulnerable because they regularly remodel. The work is the first to track the progression of Alzheimer's at the genetic and molecular levels within the neurons most susceptible to the disease. The findings suggest that aging and the accumulation amyloid-beta can cause the remodeling process to go awry, creating tangles of tau proteins that lead to neuron death.

Researchers at Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia has led to the development of an artificial liquid retinal prosthesis to counteract the effects of diseases such as retinitis pigmentosa and age-related macular degeneration that cause the progressive degeneration of photoreceptors of the retina, resulting in blindness. The collected data show that this innovative technique is valid to restore the photoreceptive capacity of retinal neurons while preserving their spatial resolution, laying a solid foundation for future clinical trials in humans.

A research team has provided the mechanistic insight into protein co-aggregation in Alzheimer's disease. The templating mechanism of S100A9 amyloids on Aβ fibrillar surfaces during co-aggregation process was revealed by synergy of biophysical methods including charge detection mass spectrometry, microscopy, kinetic and microfluidic analyses.