Tag: brain

The gut-brain connection in Alzheimer’s unveiled with X-rays

The gut-brain connection in Alzheimer’s unveiled with X-rays

Scientists led by the Institute of Nanotechnology in Italy, in collaboration with the ESRF, have discovered how X-ray micro- and nano- tomography can provide clues on the processes that link the gut neurons with those in the brain and may trigger Alzheimer’s. The results are out today in Science Advances.

Alzheimer’s disease, the most common type of dementia, is a neurodegenerative disorder characterized by brain alteration including synaptic loss, chronic inflammation and neuronal cell death.

In recent years, scientists have found evidence that the gut and the brain communicate through the neurons placed in both organs. Dysfunction in this axis has been linked to psychiatric and neurological disorders, including Alzheimer’s.

The gut microbiota, which refers to the microorganisms in the intestinal tract, plays a key role in human health and influences brain function, cognition and behaviour. “There are already many studies that support that changes in the gut composition can contribute to Alzheimer’s onset and progression”, explains Alessia Cedola, researcher from the Institute of Nanotechnology in Italy and corresponding author of the article.

In particular, dysbiosis, which is the process by which there is a loss of microbial diversity, induces the prevalence of dangerous bacteria producing toxic metabolites promoting inflammation, and, consequently, the breakage of the gut/brain barriers.

What happens exactly when gut dysbiosis occurs? “The main hypothesis is that changes trigger the escape of bad bacteria from the gut, entering the circulation, reaching the brain and triggering Alzheimer’s, but evidence is still poor”, adds Cedola.

Now scientists have discovered that nano- and micro X-ray phase-contrast tomography (XPCT) is a powerful tool to study structural and morphological alterations in the gut, without tissue manipulation. The team came to the ESRF to scan samples on beamline ID16A. “Thanks to this technique we can image soft biological tissues with excellent sensitivity in 3D, with minimal sample preparation and without contrast agents”, explains Peter Cloetens, scientist in charge of ID16A and co-author of the publication.

The data of the experiments, partially carried out at ANATOMIX at Soleil, showed the changes in cell abundance and organisation in the tissues, as well as structural alteration in different tissues of mice affected with Alzheimer’s. Specifically, it showed relevant alterations in the villi and crypts of the gut, cellular transformations in Paneth and goblet cells, along with the detection of telocytes, neurons, erythrocytes, and mucus secretion by goblet cells within the gut cavity. All these elements, when working correctly, maintain gut health, support digestion, and protect the intestinal lining from damage.

Read more on ESRF website

Image: Nano-XPCT 3D rendering of the longitudinal view of one crypt of SAMR1 mouse. The epithelial layer of the crypt has been rendered in green. The Paneth cells are colored in yellow and the goblet cells in blue. Scale bars, 5 μm.

Credit: A. Cedola

Novel drug molecule to treat Parkinson’s disease in young patients

Novel drug molecule to treat Parkinson’s disease in young patients

More than 100,000 Canadians currently live with Parkinson’s disease. A novel drug molecule being studied by researchers from McGill University could reactivate housekeeping functions in brain cells of young Parkinson’s patients, paving the way for potential future treatments for this incurable, degenerative disease.

“We are excited about this drug compound because it raises the possibility of a cure for Parkinson’s disease for a subset of patients,” said Kalle Gehring, a biochemistry professor at McGill University.

Developed by the biotech company Biogen, the new compound has shown promising results activating parkin, a key protein in the brain responsible for “cleaning up” and recycling damaged mitochondria – the energy powerhouse of the cell. When parkin doesn’t work properly, these damaged mitochondria accumulate, leading eventually to Parkinson’s disease.

In studies published in 2013 and 2018, Gehring shed light on the functions of parkin based on data collected at the Canadian Light Source (CLS) at the University of Saskatchewan (USask).

In this new follow-up study, Gehring used the CMCF beamline at the CLS to determine how the Biogen compound activates parkin. They found that it glues together parkin and a natural activator present in the cell. This molecular-level information is essential for the drug’s future development.

“The way the drug molecule turns on parkin is through a secondary route, which is effective for specific mutations of parkin that occur in younger patients,” he said.

After turning proteins into tiny crystals, Gehring and his team used a technique called protein crystallography to identify their 3D structures and learn where the novel drug binds and how it affects the proteins. The results are published in the journal Nature Communications.

“We need quality data to solve the protein structures and see their 3D pictures. It takes a facility like the CLS to take Canadian research to an international level,” said Gehring.

Read more on CLS website

Possible early diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease: iron distribution in brain regions

Possible early diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease: iron distribution in brain regions

The neurotransmitter dopamine is primarily known as the happiness hormone that controls our motivation in the brain’s reward system. However, the neurotransmitter also acts as lubricating oil for our fine motor skills and regulates the movements of our muscles. If dopamine-producing nerve cells die off, affected people experience movement disorders such as tremors or muscle stiffness. The diagnosis: Parkinson’s disease. Researchers suspect that the reason for the death of nerve cells is excessive iron concentrations in the brain.

A team of researchers from Germany and the UK has now developed a method that can be used to determine the iron concentration in the affected regions. With the participation of DESY researchers Gerald Falkenberg and Dennis Brückner, the team led by Evgeniya Kirilina from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, was able to determine possible toxic iron concentrations from MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) measurements of cells using DESY’s brilliant X-ray light source PETRA III. The work could contribute to the development of early diagnoses for Parkinson’s disease.

Parkinson’s disease is one of the most common diseases of the nervous system, affecting around 200,000 people in Germany alone. There is currently no cure for the disease. The typical Parkinson’s symptoms are caused by damaged nerve cells in the substantia nigra, an area in the brain stem. Damaged or dead nerve cells no longer produce enough dopamine or any dopamine at all – the lack of dopamine disrupts signal transmission between the nerve cells.

Iron is required for dopamine production in the nerve cells, and the corresponding nerve cells in the substantia nigra are therefore susceptible to both iron deficiency and excessive amounts of iron. Too much intracellular iron can be toxic, leading to the degeneration and death of neurons in the substantia nigra. “Oxidative stress caused by iron is considered a possible cause of the death of dopamine-producing nerve cells,” says DESY researcher Gerald Falkenberg, head of beamline P06 at DESY’s research X-ray source PETRA III. “That is why we have been looking for methods to measure the amount and distribution of iron in the brain over the course of a person’s life.” According to Falkenberg, this should also be possible for patients in hospitals in the future.

Read more on DESY website

Image: Iron deposits (red) in brain tissue: Using X-ray fluorescence measurements at DESY’s X-ray light source PETRA III, researchers were able to map the iron concentrations in nerve cells of the substantia nigra (region in the brain stem). The cell bodies (yellow) of the dopamine-producing nerve cells have a very high iron concentration.

Credit: E. Kirilina, Department of Neurophysics, MPI for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany

New insights to advance targeted brain cancer therapy

New insights to advance targeted brain cancer therapy

Despite an increase in new chemotherapies, the overall prognosis for patients with glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) remains extremely poor, with just 5% of patients surviving for more than five years. This aggressive form of brain cancer is highly resistant to treatment, prompting researchers to explore new treatment avenues. Riluzole, a drug that has already been approved by the FDA to treat amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), is currently being explored as a treatment for several cancers including GBM. However, there is a need for novel drug delivery methods to enhance riluzole’s effectiveness and overcome barriers to targeted therapy, including minimizing harmful side effects in healthy cells, and maintaining the drug’s anti-cancer efficacy until it reaches tumor cells.

In this study, which was led by Tanja Dučić, scientist in the MIRAS beamline team at the ALBA Synchrotron, and published in ACS Omega, researchers engineered carbon-based nanoparticles, or carbon dots, made of 2-acrylamido-2-methylpropanesulfonic acid (AMPS). This organic delivery system (AMPS-CDs NPs) showed biocompatibility with glioblastoma cells, and researchers were keen to test its potential to act as a nanocarrier for the drug riluzole.

Several Spanish institutions and researchers collaborated in this project, including Manuel Algarra from INAMAT2 (Institute for Advanced Materials and Mathematics), at the Public University of Navarra; Elena Gonzalez-Munoz, Maria Soledad Pino-González and Juan Soto from the University of Malaga; Pablo Guerra from the Institute of Molecular Biology of Barcelona (IBMB-CSIC); and Tanja Dučić from ALBA.

The study demonstrates the successful complementarity between synchrotron light and electron microscopy. By combining the MIRAS beamline and the Cryo-TEM at IBMB-CSIC, part of the Joint Electron Microscopy Center at ALBA (JEMCA), the collaboration achieved its first publication using both instruments. Pablo Guerra, coordinator of the Cryo-TEM, performed the microscope data acquisition. “Using the Cryo-TEM we confirmed the nanoparticles’ shape and size, with a diameter of 4.5-5 nm, which was impossible to observe with other methods”, says Tanja Dučić.

The nanoparticles were extensively characterized to determine their exact surface composition using techniques that included XPS (X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy) and NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance) spectroscopy, as well as cryo-transmission electron microscopy. The synthesized nanoparticles are covered in sulfonated, carboxylic, and substituted amide groups. These functional groups make the AMPS-CDs potentially suitable nanocarriers for riluzole.

Read more on ALBA website

Image: Researchers Tanja Dučić from ALBA and Pablo Guerra from IBMB-CSIC at the control room of the EM01-Cryo-TEM of the Joint Electron Microscopy Center at ALBA

Credit: JEMCA

More Brain-like Computers Could Cut IT Energy Costs

More Brain-like Computers Could Cut IT Energy Costs

The dynamics of magnetic metamaterials offer a path to low-energy, next-gen computing

The public launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in November 2022 caused a media sensation and kicked off a rapid proliferation of similar Large Language Models (LLMs). However, the computing power needed to train and run these LLMs and other artificial intelligence (AI) systems is colossal, and the energy requirements are staggering. Training the GPT-3 model behind ChatGPT, for example, required 355 years of single-processor computing time and consumed 284,000 kWh of energy1. This is one example of a task that the human brain handles much more efficiently than a traditional computer, and researchers are investigating the potential of more brain-like (neuromorphic) computing methods that may prove to be more energy efficient. Physical reservoir computing is one such method, using the natural, complex responses of materials to perform challenging computations. Researchers from the University of Sheffield are investigating the use of magnetic metamaterials – structured at the nanoscale to exhibit complex and emergent properties – to perform such computations. In work recently published in Communications Physics, they have demonstrated an ability to tune the system to achieve state-of-the-art performance in different types of computation. Their results show that an array of interconnected magnetic nanorings is a promising architecture for neuromorphic computing systems.

Emergence Could Power More Brain-Like Computers

Anyone who has witnessed the majestic and mesmerising flight of a murmuration of starlings has no doubt wondered how a flock of birds can achieve such synchronised behaviour. This is an example of emergence, where the interactions of simple things lead to complex collective behaviours. But emergence doesn’t only occur in the natural world, and a group at the University of Sheffield is investigating how the emergent behaviour can be engineered in magnetic materials when they are patterned to have nanoscale dimensions.

Dr Tom Hayward, Senior Lecturer in Materials Physics at the University of Sheffield and author of this paper says,

Life is inherently emergent – with simple entities connecting together to give complex behaviours that a single element would not have. It’s exciting because we can take simple things – which hypothetically can be very energy efficient – and make them manifest the kind of complexity we see in the brain. Material computation relies on the fact that many materials that exhibit some form of memory can take an input and transform it into a different output – precisely the properties we need to perform computation. Our system connects a series of tiny magnetic rings into a big ensemble. One individual ring in isolation shows quite simple behaviours. But when we connect them, they interact with each other to give complex behaviours.

Magnets have a number of properties that make them interesting for these kinds of applications: 

  • Firstly, they are non-volatile, with inherent memory – if you stick a magnet to your fridge, it stays put.
  • Brains (and brain-like computers) need to have non-linear responses, taking simple information and performing complicated transforms, and that’s something magnets are naturally good at.
  • There are plenty of ways to make magnets change state and perform computations that use very little energy.
  • And magnets are a well-established technology (used, for example, in hard drives and Magnetoresistive random-access memory (MRAM)), and so there are existing routes to technology integration.

XPEEM Highlights the Underlying Magnetic Dynamics

Key to this research is understanding what’s happening to these magnetic nanorings when they’re connected together – the way that emergence changes the way they change magnetic states.

Read more on Diamond website

Diamond helps discover microscopic metallic particles in the brain

Diamond helps discover microscopic metallic particles in the brain

A UK-led international team of researchers has discovered elemental metallic copper and iron in the human brain for the first time. The team, comprised of scientists from Keele University and the University of Warwick in collaboration with the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA), used Diamond, and the Advanced Light Source located in California (USA) to identify elemental metallic copper and magnetic elemental iron within the amyloid plaques, chemical forms of copper and iron previously undocumented in human biology.

The study, published in Science Advances and funded by the UKRI’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, looked at amyloid plaques isolated from the brain tissue of deceased Alzheimer’s patients. Amyloid plaques, a hallmark feature of Alzheimer’s disease, act as a site of disrupted metal chemistry in the Alzheimer’s brain, and are believed by many to be integral to disease progression.

Read more on Diamond website

Image: X-ray microscope images and X-ray absorption spectra obtained from two Alzheimer’s disease plaque cores, measured at Diamond’s beamline I08. Image: Science Advances.

Credit: Science Advances.

New Data sheds light on genesis of our body’s powerhouses

New Data sheds light on genesis of our body’s powerhouses

The mitochondria and its protein making “plants” – mitoribosomes

Scientists uncover for the first time how the body’s energy makers are made using Cryo-Electron Microscopy (cryo-EM) at eBIC within Diamond.

A new paper, published in Science on the 19th February, by an international team of researchers reports an insight into ‘the molecular mechanism of membrane-tethered protein synthesis in mitochondria’. This is a fundamental understanding of how the human mitoribosome functions and could explain how it is affected by mutations and deregulation that lead to disorders such as deafness and diseases including cancer development. 

Mitochondria are intracellular organelles which serve as tiny but potent powerhouses in our body. They use oxygen which we inhale and derivatives from food we eat to produce more than 90% of our energy, and therefore effectively support our life. Mitochondria are particularly important in high-energy demanding organs such as heart, liver, muscles and brain. For example, almost 40% of each heart muscle cell is made up of mitochondria.

Read more on the Diamond website

Image: The mitoribosome is attached to its membrane adaptor as it synthesises a bioenergetic protein (glow yellow).

Credit: Dan W. Nowakowski and Alexey Amunts

NSRRC Users Prof. Yuh-Ju Sun and Dr. Chwan-Deng Hsiao Solved the Mystery of Brain Calcification

NSRRC Users Prof. Yuh-Ju Sun and Dr. Chwan-Deng Hsiao Solved the Mystery of Brain Calcification

A research team led by the NSRRC user, Prof. Yuh-Ju Sun (Institute of Bioinformatics and Structural Biology at National Tsing Hua University) has identified the molecular mechanism of phosphate transporter, which offers a glimmer of hope for dementia treatments. Prof. Sun collaborated with another NSRRC user, Dr. Chwan-Deng Hsiao (Academia Sinica), and revealed the structure of the sodium dependent phosphate transporter. This discovery marked a significant milestone for the studies on membrane proteins, and the research result was published in the prestigious journal Science Advances in August 2020.

Read more on the NSRRC website

Image: Prof. Yuh-Ju Sun and her collaborator Dr. Chwan-Deng Hsiao solved the structure of membrane proteins, paving the way for a better treatment of dementia.

New nanoimaging method traces metal presence in Parkinson’s brain

New nanoimaging method traces metal presence in Parkinson’s brain

Many neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s often exhibit an excess of iron in the brain. Scientists have developed a method to trace the presence of metals in brain at the sub-cellular level, particularly in organelles of neurons vulnerable to these diseases. The results are published in Communications Biology.

The level and distribution of iron in the brain normally contributes to essential cellular functions, including mitochondrial respiration, via its capability to transfer electrons. In vulnerable populations of neurons however, iron dysregulation can have detrimental effects. Genetic defects affecting iron metabolism cause brain diseases, including Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, both associated with iron overload. “It is important to be able to explore metal distribution in neurons and glia (non-neuronal cells), with the aim to identify potential causal mechanisms in neurodegeneration”, explains Bernard Schneider, scientist at EPFL and co-author of the study.

Until now, there was no method that could trace the elements with sensitivity and nanometre resolution. A team of scientists from LGL-TPE (Laboratoire de Géologie de Lyon : Terre, Planètes et Environnement), Institut des Sciences de la terre (ISTerre) de Grenoble, the ESRF and the EPFL (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne) have now combined the techniques of transmission electron microscopy and synchrotron X-ray fluorescence at the ESRF in order to evaluate the element unbalance in Parkinson’s disease.

Read more on the ESRF website

Image : Composition of P/Fe/S in a section of a neuron of the substantia nigra. The neuron and its nucleus are highlighted by dashed lines. Cytoplasmic granules rich in Fe and S are pointed out by arrows. 

Credit: Lemelle, L, et al, Communications Biology, DOI : 10.1038/s42003-020-1084-0.

Lucy had an ape-like brain, but prolonged brain growth like humans

Lucy had an ape-like brain, but prolonged brain growth like humans

A study led by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology reveals that Lucy’s species, Australopithecus afarensis, had an ape-like brain.

However, the protracted brain growth suggests that infants may have had a long dependence on caregivers, as in humans. The study, in collaboration with the ESRF, is published in Science Advances.

The species Australopithecus afarensis, well-known as Lucy’s species, inhabited East Africa more than three million years ago, and occupies a key position in the hominin family tree.. “Lucy and her kind provide important evidence about early hominin behavior. They walked upright, had brains that were around 20 percent larger than those of chimpanzees and may have used sharp stone tools,” explains senior author Zeresenay Alemseged from the University of Chicago, who directs the Dikika field project in Ethiopia, where the skeleton of an Australopithecus afarensis child, known as Dikika child and nicknamed Selam, was found in the year 2000. “Our new results show how their brains developed, and how they were organized,” adds Alemseged.

>Read more on the European Synchrotron website

Image: Brain imprints in fossil skulls of the speciesAustralopithecus afarensis(famous for “Lucy” and the “Dikika child” from Ethiopia pictured here) shed new lighton the evolution of brain growth and organization. The exceptionally preservedendocranial imprint of the Dikika child reveals an ape-likebrain organization, and nofeatures derived towards humans.
Credit: Philipp Gunz, MPI EVA Leipzig.

Synchrotron light unveils new insights about amytrophic lateral sclerosis

Synchrotron light unveils new insights about amytrophic lateral sclerosis

Synergetic combination of different imaging and spectroscopic synchrotron techniques performed in ALBA and APS (USA) has discovered new aspects about astrocytes cells of this neurodegenerative disease.

Results, published in Analytical Chemistry, show significant differences between ALS and control astrocytes, including structural, chemical and macromolecular anomalies. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a fatal progressive neurodegenerative disease that causes the degeneration and death of neurons that control voluntary muscles. Still today the causes of this disease are unknown in 90% of the cases. However, some of them are caused by the mutation of sod1 gene. This gene encodes an enzyme (SOD1) that is involved in cellular protection against oxidative stress. Mutations dramatically alter the biochemical properties of SOD1, in particular its metal binding affinity and its anti-oxidative activity levels. But it is still unknown how these mutations block the normal cell function and lead to death of motor neurons. The ALBA Synchrotron, in collaboration with researchers from the University of Belgrade Pavle Andjus and Stefan Stamenković (who accomplished his PhD thesis using these results) and Vladan Lučić from Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry (Germany), has studied with synchrotron light techniques and classical biochemical laboratory approaches the cellular structural and biochemical changes of this gene mutation in a transgenic animal model of ALS. In particular, scientists have analysed astrocytes, one kind of brain cells that are key players in pathological processes of this disease.

>Read more on the ALBA website

Image: Researcher Tanja Dučić during the experiment performed at ALBA, at the MIRAS beamline.

A new approach for finding Alzheimer’s treatments

A new approach for finding Alzheimer’s treatments

Considering what little progress has been made finding drugs to treat Alzheimer’s disease, Maikel Rheinstädter decided to come at the problem from a totally different angle—perhaps the solution lay not with the peptide clusters known as senile plaques typically found in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients, but with the surrounding brain tissue that allowed those plaques to form in the first place.
It was a novel approach that paid off for Rheinstädter and his team of researchers from McMaster University who used the Canadian Light Source in Saskatoon as part of a study of the effect various compounds have on membranes in brain tissue and the possible impact on plaque formation.

“Alzheimer’s disease has interested me for a long time,” said Rheinstädter, a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and the Origins Institute at McMaster. “It is something almost every Canadian will be affected by in their lives.”

>Read more on the Canadian Light Source website

Image: Adam Hitchcock, Adree Khondker and Maikel Rheinstädter.

Unprecedented 3D images of neurons in healthy and epileptic brains

Unprecedented 3D images of neurons in healthy and epileptic brains

Results open new perspectives for the study of neurodevelopment and neurodegenerative diseases.

A comprehensive understanding of the brain, its development, and eventual degeneration, depends on the assessment of neuronal number, spatial organization, and connectivity. However, the study of the brain architecture at the level of individual cells is still a major challenge in neuroscience.
In this context, Matheus de Castro Fonseca, from the Brazilian Biosciences National Laboratory (LNBio), and collaborators [1] used the facilities of the Brazilian Synchrotron Light Laboratory (LNLS) to obtain, for the first time, three-dimensional images in high resolution of part of the neuronal circuit, observed directly in the brain and with single cell resolution.

The researchers used the IMX X-Ray Microtomography beamline, in combination with the Golgi-Cox mercury-based impregnation protocol, which proved to be an efficient non-destructive tool for the study of the nervous system. The combination made it possible to observe the points of connectivity and the detailed morphology of a region of the brain, without the need for tissue slicing or clearing.
The mapping of neurons in healthy and unhealthy tissues should improve the research in neurodegenerative and neurodevelopmental diseases. As an example of this possibility, the work presents, for the first time in 3D, the neuronal death in an animal model of epilepsy.

The researchers are now working to extend the technique to animal models of Parkinson’s disease. The intention is to better understand the cellular mechanisms involved in the onset and progression of the disease. In the future, with the inauguration of the new Brazilian synchrotron light source, Sirius, the researchers believe that it will be possible to obtain images at the subcellular level, that is, images of the interior of the neurons.

>Read more on the Brazilian Synchrotron Light Laboratory website

Image: X-ray microtomography of the cerebral cortex showing the segmentation of individual neurons. Each color represents a single neuron or a group of neurons.

Google Maps for the cerebellum

Google Maps for the cerebellum

A team of researchers from Göttingen has successfully applied a special variant of X-ray imaging to brain tissue. With the combination of high-resolution measurements at DESY’s X-ray light source PETRA III and data from a laboratory X-ray source, Tim Salditt’s group from the Institute of X-ray Physics at the Georg August University of Göttingen was able to visualize about 1.8 million nerve cells in the cerebellar cortex. The researchers describe the investigations with the so-called phase contrast tomography in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
The human cerebellum contains about 80 percent of all nerve cells in 10 percent of the brain volume – one cubic millimeter can therefore contain more than one million nerve cells. These process signals that mainly control learned and unconscious movement sequences. However, their exact positions and neighbourhood relationships are largely unknown. “Tomography in the so-called phase contrast mode and subsequent automated image processing enables the cells to be located and displayed in their exact position,” explains Mareike Töpperwien from the Institute of X-ray Physics at the University of Göttingen, lead author of the publication.

>Read more on the PETRA III at DESY website

Image: Result of the phase contrast X-ray tomography at DESY’s X-ray source PETRA III.
Credit: Töpperwien et al., Universität Göttingen

Metallic drivers of Alzheimer’s disease

Metallic drivers of Alzheimer’s disease

The detection of iron and calcium compounds in amyloid plaque cores

X-ray spectromicroscopy at the Scanning X-ray Microscopy beamline (I08), here at Diamond, has been utilised to pinpoint chemically reduced iron and calcium compounds within protein plaques derived from brains of Alzheimer’s disease patients. The study, published in Nanoscale, has shed light on the way in which metallic species contribute to the pathogenesis of Alzheimer’s disease and could help direct future therapies.

Alzheimer’s disease is a neurodegenerative disease that is associated with dementia and shortened life expectancy. The disease is characterised by the formation of protein plaques and tangles in the brain that impair function. As well as protein plaques, perturbed metal ion homeostasis is also linked with pathogenesis, and iron levels in particular are elevated in certain regions of the brain.

A team of scientists with a long history in exploring biomineralisation in Alzheimer’s brains set out to characterise the iron species that are associated with the amyloid protein plaques. They extracted samples from the brains of two deceased patients who had Alzheimer’s and applied synchrotron X-ray spectromicroscopy to differentiate the iron oxide phases in the samples.

They noted evidence that the chemical reduction of iron, and indeed the formation of a magnetic iron oxide called magnetite, which is not commonly found in the human brain, had occurred during amyloid plaque formation, a finding that could help inform the outcomes of future Alzheimer’s therapies.

>Read more on the Diamond Light Source website

Image: Synchrotron soft X-ray nano-imaging and spectromicroscopy reveals iron and calcium biomineralisation in Alzheimer’s disease amyloid plaques.

The Brain Revisited

The Brain Revisited

How does it work? Mazes of neurons all joined together by trillions of synaptic connections…

Everything we do – from writing our name to remembering it – is the result of billions of nerve cells, also known as neurons, firing electro-chemical signals through our brains. The way we experience the world around us is tied up in these mazes of neurons, all joined together by trillions of synaptic connections. Thanks to all this processing power, our brains are more complex than any computer system on earth.

The astonishing intricacy of our brains allows us to perform incredible feats of thought. But there’s also a downside to possessing all this brain power. With all that complex machinery at play, errors in the system can spell big trouble for our health. Neurodegenerative conditions like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s are linked to problems with the brain’s neural network. Because these networks are so labyrinthine, we don’t yet understand the brain and, in turn, how to combat neurological conditions, as well as we’d like.

>Read More on the Diamond Light Source website