Tangled Fly Eyes

Protein aggregations are a feature of many neurodegenerative conditions. Tangles of tau proteins within brain cells, for example, are a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease. Because it’s practically impossible to study the progression of such diseases at a cellular level in humans, researchers rely on animal models, including the fruit fly. The picture shows the dramatic effect of expressing human tau protein in the insect’s eye (right). A healthy eye is shown on the left for comparison. Using flies, scientists have discovered disease-related forms of tau jam up the neurons’ transportation machinery. This causes their axons, along which impulses travel, to retract and lose connections with other cells, which ultimately kills the neurons. Researchers have also identified tau-interacting proteins that make tau tangles even more toxic. By unravelling these details of the tau tangling process in flies, the ultimate aim, of course, is to prevent or reverse it in patients.

Written by Ruth Williams

Ruth Williams

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Ruth is a freelance science journalist based in the US. She's a regular correspondent for The Scientist, and her work has appeared in The Lancet, Nature, Scientific American Mind, BBC Focus and elsewhere. Twitter @rooph

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• Image from work by Jamshid Asadzadeh and colleagues
• Brain Mind Institute, EPFL – Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Nature Communications, August 2022