In mice, nematodes, and cultured human cells, scientists from Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital and their colleagues this week showed that amyloid-β peptides can trap invading microbes, suggesting a potential link between infection and Alzheimer’s—a disease characterized in part by an accumulation of amyloid-β plaques in the brain.
“Amyloid-β is overdue for an update,” said Douglas Ethell of Western University of Health Sciences in California who was not involved in the work. “For too long it’s been viewed as a useless byproduct that wreaks havoc on the human brain. This paper adds to a growing body of evidence that amyloid-β serves important physiological roles that we are only now beginning to understand.”
Using a new approach, called genome editing of synthetic target arrays for lineage tracing, Harvard scientists and their colleagues have followed the lives of mutation-tagged zebrafish cells.
“This method can be used to unravel any process that ...
