Studies by researchers at University of South Florida Health (USF Health) Morsani College of Medicine have found that a protein known as β-arrestin2 increases the accumulation of the neurotoxic tau tangles that cause several forms of dementia, by interfering with the process that cells use to remove excess tau from…

Biomarkers are indicators of biological events. They are either present, or not; they may increase or decrease; or simply change form. They relate to normal biological states, the presence of disease (or the risk of it), or in response to intrusions into the body, including medical treatment or injury. Above…

New research from the UK has revealed that the build-up of proteins in neuronal cells—the hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease—might be affecting the activity of genes implicated in the disease. This novel discovery may help shed more light on how and why these proteins build up, and how they lead to…

Tau has long been implicated in Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases but it is not yet clear how this protein converts from its normal, functional form into a misfolded, harmful one. Now, researchers at Columbia University’s Zuckerman Institute and Mayo Clinic in Florida have used cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) along with mass spectrometry to provide…

In a world first, researchers have created a genome reference database of thousands of healthy older Australians, which has the potential to predict disease-linked gene variants more accurately than has been previously possible. The team just released the first 2,570 genomes of the Medical Genome Reference Bank (MGRB) and published…

New research from investigators at the UC San Francisco Memory and Aging Center, has shown that brain imaging of pathological tau-protein tangles can reliably predict the location of future brain atrophy in Alzheimer’s patients a year or more in advance. The findings may signal a shift away from the heavy…

A team of investigators at the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE) and the University of Bonn have just published findings from a new metastudy that found artificial intelligence can detect one of the most common forms of blood cancer—acute myeloid leukemia (AML)—with high reliability. The research teams’ approach was…

Expansions of short tandem repeats (STRs) in DNA are genetic variants that have been implicated in multiple neuropsychiatric and other disorders, but which are hard to analyze using current methods. Researchers in Germany, led by a team at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin, have now developed…

An international team of researchers has identified a rare mutation in the APOE3 gene of one patient with Alzheimer’s disease, which could help to explain why some people are more resistant to the neurodegenerative disease than others. The findings could also potentially lead to new strategies for delaying or even…

The UK government will partner with four biopharma giants and the Wellcome Sanger Institute on a £200 million ($246.9 million) initiative to complete the whole genome sequencing of the 450,000 yet-to-be-sequenced participants in the UK Biobank. The public-private effort aims to improve public health through genetic research, as well as…

A key gene has been uncovered behind the formation of neuron-damaging protein aggregates that cause amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and other neurological diseases. The authors of this study, from Stanford University School of Medicine and with collaborators, have shown that inhibiting the gene’s function curbs production of those aggregates. The…

Scientists at Trinity College Dublin published a paper in JAMA that represented the largest ever study (“Lifetime Risk and Heritability of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis”) involving 1,117 people diagnosed with motor neuron disease (MND) to address the question of “nature versus nurture” in the causes of MND, also known as Amyotrophic…

A new study led by researchers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) adds more weight to previous findings implicating variants of the gene ARMC5 in the increased risk of hypertension in blacks. Researchers identified 17 variants in the gene that were associated with high blood pressure in individuals of…

One key to developing a treatment for Huntington’s disease (HD), according to many researchers, involves the challenging task of reducing the expression of the patient’s mutated copy of the huntingtin gene (HTT) while leaving the wild type copy untouched. A collaborative project between Sangamo Therapeutics and the CHDI foundation, a…

The New York Genome Center (NYGC) will receive a combined $125 million gift from the Simons Foundation and The Carson Family Charitable Trust, saying the money will help support the Center’s growth and research into autism, ALS, dementia and cancer. NYGC said the gift, to be awarded over five years,…