Signaling a halt in PD

Progressive degeneration of dopaminergic neurons in the substantia nigra accounts for the debilitating motor symptoms in Parkinson's disease. While current therapies provide only temporary symptomatic benefit, researchers from Yale University and colleagues suggest inhibiting aberrant mitotic signals could yield new therapeutic strategies that could slow down or possibly prevent neurodegeneration in PD.

As published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers' studies in human postmortem tissue and in vivo and in vitro models of PD showed that mature dopaminergic neurons in PD patients aberrantly express mitosis-associated proteins, including the E2F transcription factor 1 (E2F1), and the cells appear to duplicate their nuclear DNA...