Berkeley
•83% Informative
University of California, Berkeley , researchers find protein clumps kill brain cells.
Brain cells have to clean up protein aggregates before turning off stress response, they say.
Finding could offer clinicians another option for treatment for some neurodegenerative diseases.
Future treatment likely would involve administration of a drug to turn off the stress response and a drug that turns off the response.
A protein called UBR4 assembles a specific ubiquitin signal that was required for the elimination of proteins that tend to aggregate inside cells.
This signal was needed when a cell couldn’t sort proteins into its mitochondria.
Such proteins that end up at the wrong location in cells tend to clump and, in turn, cause neurodegeneration.
By helping degrade these two proteins, the SIFI complex turns off the stress response.
Co-authors include postdoctoral fellows Diane Haakonsen , Michael Heider , Samuel Witus and Andrew Ingersoll .
The work was supported primarily by the StinehartReed Foundation and the National Institutes of Health (RF1 AG048131, T32MH020016 -25).
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