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What did Stephen Hawking and Mao Zedong have in common? They both suffered from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), for which a cure remains elusive. Scientists took an important step toward the prevention of ALS and another brain disorder called Frontotemporal dementia (FTD) with their research on the effects of the antibiotic rifampicin on genetically modified mice. "The primary cause of FTD and ALS is a hexanucleotide repeat expansion (HRE) in non-coding regions of the C9orf72 gene," said Professor Takami Tomiyama. This mutation causes neurodegeneration through loss-of-function or gain-of-toxic-function mutations.Rifampicin is an antibiotic that slows bacterial RNA production; it is usually...

This shows lewy bodies. Brown spots are immunostaining using an antibody specifically recognizing an abnormal form of alpha-synuclein. Clumps of α-synuclein protein in nerve cells are hallmarks of many degenerative brain diseases, most notably Parkinson's disease. "No one has been able to determine if Lewy bodies and Lewy neurites, hallmark pathologies in Parkinson's disease can be degraded," says Virginia Lee, PhD, director of the Center for Neurodegenerative Disease Research, at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania. "With the new neuron model system of Parkinson's disease pathologies our lab has developed recently, we demonstrated that these aberrant clumps in...