New Insights into Parkinson’s Disease and Synaptic Plasticity

Researchers at Università degli Studi di Perugia and Ospedale Santa Maria della Misericordia in Italy recently published an article entitled “The changing tree in Parkinson’s disease” in the journal Nature Neuroscience. This report focused on recent findings, entitled “Dynamic rewiring…

The Lawson Health Research Institute recently signed a licensing agreement with STEMCELL Technologies to transfer international exclusive rights to commercialize innovative tools for Parkinson’s Disease research. STEMCELL Technologies provides more than 2,000 products to over 70 countries worldwide, including cell culture reagents, instruments and tools designed to support science along the basic to translational…

This week, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researcher, Ann M. Graybiel, Ph.D. whose laboratory is part of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research and is focused on studying brain structures that are important for normal brain function but are also implicated in Parkinson’s disease, released results from a study…

In a new study entitled “VPS35 in Dopamine Neurons Is Required for Endosome-to-Golgi Retrieval of Lamp2a, a Receptor of Chaperone-Mediated Autophagy That Is Critical for α-Synuclein Degradation and Prevention of Pathogenesis of Parkinson’s Disease” scientists discovered that loss of the VPS35 protein expression in Parkinson’s disease interferes…

While scientists already know that the basal ganglia of the brain is related to movement disorders such as Parkinson’s disease and Huntington’s disease, this structure has always been difficult to study.  This is because the basal ganglia is a very small part of the brain located deep inside its anatomy and the various pathways…

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania recently reported a new technique based on nanopores for the study of protein structure. The technique can potentially be applied in the study of protein aggregation that occurs in neurodegenerative disorders like Parkinson’s disease. The study was published in the journal…

In a new study entitled “Identification of neurodegenerative factors using translatome–regulatory network analysis” scientists at Rockefeller University identified two new proteins with key roles in Parkinson’s disease. The study was published in the journal Nature Neuroscience. Parkinson’s disease is a progressive degenerative disease of…

Dr. Michel Goedert from the Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Medical Research Council in the United Kingdom recently published in the journal Science a review on the mechanisms underlying Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases and their similarity to prion diseases. The study is entitled “Alzheimer’s…

The battle against Parkinson’s disease may be getting sweeter, with a new study underway seeking to understand if concentrated chocolate supplements could help alleviate the disease’s symptoms. A team of researchers from Dresden University of Technology, Germany, are busy conducting tests on 30 participants to further understand the benefits of phenylethylamine, a compound found…

Four years ago, in 2011, science journalist Jon Palfreman went to see his physician about the tremors he had been experiencing in his left hand. It was then, at 60 years of age, that Jon found out he already had Parkinson’s disease, a neurodegenerative disorder that causes a gradual loss…