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Journal ArticleDOI

Chaperone Suppression of α-Synuclein Toxicity in a Drosophila Model for Parkinson's Disease

TLDR
Direct expression of the molecular chaperone Hsp70 prevented dopaminergic neuronal loss associated with α-synuclein in Drosophila and that interference with endogenous chaper one activity accelerated α- synuclein toxicity, suggesting chaperones may play a role in Parkinson's disease progression.
Abstract
Parkinson's disease is a movement disorder characterized by degeneration of dopaminergic neurons in the substantia nigra pars compacta. Dopaminergic neuronal loss also occurs in Drosophila melanogaster upon directed expression of alpha-synuclein, a protein implicated in the pathogenesis of Parkinson's disease and a major component of proteinaceous Lewy bodies. We report that directed expression of the molecular chaperone Hsp70 prevented dopaminergic neuronal loss associated with alpha-synuclein in Drosophila and that interference with endogenous chaperone activity accelerated alpha-synuclein toxicity. Furthermore, Lewy bodies in human postmortem tissue immunostained for molecular chaperones, also suggesting that chaperones may play a role in Parkinson's disease progression.

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Protein Misfolding, Functional Amyloid, and Human Disease

TL;DR: The relative importance of the common main-chain and side-chain interactions in determining the propensities of proteins to aggregate is discussed and some of the evidence that the oligomeric fibril precursors are the primary origins of pathological behavior is described.
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Parkinson's disease: Mechanisms and models

TL;DR: PD models based on the manipulation of PD genes should prove valuable in elucidating important aspects of the disease, such as selective vulnerability of substantia nigra dopaminergic neurons to the degenerative process.
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Molecular chaperones in protein folding and proteostasis

TL;DR: It is suggested that an age-related decline in proteostasis capacity allows the manifestation of various protein-aggregation diseases, including Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease, which may spring from a detailed understanding of the pathways underlying proteome maintenance.
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Adapting proteostasis for disease intervention.

TL;DR: The proteostasis network is described, a set of interacting activities that maintain the health of proteome and the organism that has the potential to ameliorate some of the most challenging diseases of this era.
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Protofibrils, pores, fibrils, and neurodegeneration: separating the responsible protein aggregates from the innocent bystanders.

TL;DR: Recent biophysical studies aimed at elucidating the precise mechanism of in vitro aggregation and animal modeling studies support the emerging notion that an ordered prefibrillar oligomer, or protofibril, may be responsible for cell death and that the fibril form that is typically observed at autopsy may actually be neuroprotective.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI

Targeted gene expression as a means of altering cell fates and generating dominant phenotypes.

TL;DR: The GAL4 system, a system for targeted gene expression that allows the selective activation of any cloned gene in a wide variety of tissue- and cell-specific patterns, has been designed and used to expand the domain of embryonic expression of the homeobox protein even-skipped.
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Mutation in the α-synuclein gene identified in families with Parkinson's disease

TL;DR: A mutation was identified in the α-synuclein gene, which codes for a presynaptic protein thought to be involved in neuronal plasticity, in the Italian kindred and in three unrelated families of Greek origin with autosomal dominant inheritance for the PD phenotype.
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Alpha-synuclein in Lewy bodies.

TL;DR: Strong staining of Lewy bodies from idiopathic Parkinson's disease with antibodies for α-synuclein, a presynaptic protein of unknown function which is mutated in some familial cases of the disease, indicates that the LewY bodies from these two diseases may have identical compositions.
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The Hsp70 and Hsp60 chaperone machines.

TL;DR: This work dedicates this work to Guenter Brueckner, always an inspiration, and to Wayne Fenton for critical reading and Zhaohui Xu for figure preparation.
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