Emory researchers discovered a new type of pathology in the brains of patients with Alzheimer’s disease, which could have a major effect on the way scientists understand and treat the disease, according to a Sept. 11 University press release.
According to the press release, researchers discovered an unusual pattern in proteins.
They found tangle-like structures in early stages of Alzheimer’s that have not been found in any other neurodegenerative diseases.
The tangles interfere with RNA splicing, a process in which the instructional messages from genes are cut and put together.
“We were very surprised to find alterations in proteins that are responsible for RNA splicing in Alzheimer’s, which could have major implications for the disease mechanism,” Allan Levey, chair of Neurology at Emory’s School of Medicine, said in the press release.
These findings could help physicians and scientists understand how Alzheimer’s disease develops and progresses and could lead to new biomarkers, diagnostic approaches and therapies, Levey explained.
According to James Lah, director of Emory’s Cognitive Neurology program, previous investigations examined how the disease alters splicing in individual genes, but their new results suggest there is a distortion in RNA processing on a global scale.
Alzheimer’s disease develops from accumulations of plaques and tangles, such as beta-amyloid and tau proteins, but much of the disease pathology is still unknown because of the varying degrees of severity in patients, according to the press release.
According to the press release, the team identified 36 proteins in the brain tissue of Alzheimer’s patients. They found many proteins involved in RNA splicing. One of these proteins, U1 snRNP, was not seen in any other brain diseases.
That protein may be producing changes in RNA processing that affects some genes that are important in Alzheimer’s.
If researchers can understand what these changes are, they could find new ways to approach treatment of the disease.
Allan Levey, James Lah and Junmin Peng, previously an associate professor of genetics at Emory and now a faculty member at St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital in Atlanta, all conducted this research.
The results were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Early Edition.
– By Mallika Manyapu
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