Meet some of the people featured in the October 2021 issue of The Scientist.

The single-celled fungus allows researchers to study Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, ALS and other brain diseases with unparalleled speed and scale.

The cell conversion strategy restores neurons and motor functions lost as a result of an induced Parkinson’s-like illness in the animals.

The University of Toronto and University of Vienna pharmacologist developed L-dopa, a precursor to dopamine that remains the most widely used therapy for Parkinson’s disease.

The BioCollective, a company that transforms whole stool samples into microbial metadata, is developing the US’s first national microbiome reference material.

The plant geneticist has revolutionized researchers’ understanding of how light affects plant growth and development, and is engineering plants to combat climate change.

Brain banks have struggled to convince unaffected individuals to donate, hampering studies on “cognitively normal” neurodevelopment and aging.

This year’s most beautiful illustrations covered topics including the molecular underpinnings of Parkinson’s disease and strategies for tracking marine organisms around the world’s oceans.

New evidence points to a waste-clearing problem in patients’ cells, rather than the accumulation of protein tangles, as the root cause of the neurodegenerative disease.

Damage to the lysosome, the organelle that removes excess proteins, lipids, and other materials, might be at the root of the disease.

The University of Cambridge scholar’s research on folding proteins advanced scientists’ understanding of illnesses, such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and type 2 diabetes.

Researchers teamed up with a woman with a keen sense of smell to identify telling differences between healthy people and those with the neurodegenerative disease.

Scientists may need to seriously reconsider the cast-aside hypothesis that pathogens can play a part in diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

Clinical trials that target human endogenous retroviruses to treat multiple sclerosis, ALS, and other ailments are underway, but many questions remain about how these sequences may disrupt our biology.