Doctors Grow Parkinsonian Human Brain Cells In Vitro, Shedding Light on the Genetics of the Disease

Thursday, February 9, 2012 - 10:32 in Biology & Nature

Parkinson's Disease in the Brain The brownish area is a Lewy body, an abnormal protein chunk that develops inside brain cells in Parkinson's disease. Wikipedia For the first time, Parkinson's researchers have made human brain cells derived from the skin cells of patients who carry a mutated gene related to Parkinson's disease. This means researchers can now track exactly how this mutation, in a gene called parkin, causes the disease in about 10 percent of Parkinson's patients. This is a major breakthrough because it will allow researchers to study brain cells affected by Parkinson's in real time. Animals that do not have this gene cannot readily develop Parkinson's-like symptoms, so researchers must use human neurons, but it's generally difficult if not impossible to get live human brain cells to study. Instead, Jian Feng and colleagues at the State University of New York-Buffalo took skin cells from four patients, including two healthy patients...

Read the whole article on PopSci

More from PopSci

Latest Science Newsletter

Get the latest and most popular science news articles of the week in your Inbox! It's free!

Check out our next project, Biology.Net