Your lysosomes are recycling units, but their function slowly fails with age - meaning your cells degrade as they fill with waste and junk. More rapid and selective lysosomal failure in brain cells is implicated in a variety of neurodegenerative conditions. Here, researchers dig more deeply: "Neurodegenerative disorders, like Alzheimer's disease, are a devastating group of conditions that exact a heavy toll on patients and their families. ... Research over the past two decades has strongly suggested that a fundamental problem in affected nerve cells relates to accumulation of cellular 'garbage,' or proteins and other material that is too old to function properly. Thus, understanding how the neuron handles these outdated molecules is of great significance. Here we find that upregulation of one such cellular degrading pathway, the lysosome, can have significant deleterious effects to the neuron. We specifically show that expanding the lysosomal compartment can markedly increase production of a very toxic form of tau, a protein strongly implicated in neuronal dysfunction and death in Alzheimer's disease and related disorders. Our findings have important implications for the development of neurodegenerative disease therapies that seek to manipulate the lysosome and the proteins within the lysosome." Therapies that can repair failing lysosomes may have general application to rejuvenation medicine - so the more groups working on that, the better.

View the Article Under Discussion: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2904797/

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