Fight Aging!

The lack of tangible progress over the last fifteen years towards working therapies for Alzheimer's disease that are based on clearing amyloid has led to a great diversity of alternative thinking on the causes and pathology of the condition, as well as on other approaches to treatment. It is easier to theorize than it is to push therapies through trials, so this sort of thing is to be expected whenever the road ahead turns out to be much harder than expected. Some of the recent theorizing on Alzheimer's disease is quite promising, and some of it is quite dubious. From a first reading, this one falls somewhere in the middle. It should probably be read in the context of what has been discovered of the role of lamins in progeria versus in normal aging, the latter a work of investigation still very much in progress.

The cell nucleus is typically depicted as a sphere encircled by a smooth surface of nuclear envelope. For most cell types, this depiction is accurate. In other cell types and in some pathological conditions, however, the smooth nuclear exterior is interrupted by tubular invaginations of the nuclear envelope, often referred to as a "nucleoplasmic reticulum," into the deep nuclear interior. We have recently reported a significant expansion of the nucleoplasmic reticulum in postmortem human Alzheimer's disease brain tissue. We found that dysfunction of the nucleoskeleton, a lamin-rich meshwork that coats the inner nuclear membrane and associated invaginations, is causal for Alzheimer's disease-related neurodegeneration in vivo.

Neurons of tau transgenic Drosophila and of postmortem human Alzheimer's disease brains harbor significant invaginations of the nuclear envelope and have reduced levels of B-type lamin protein compared to controls. Dysfunction of B-type lamins has functional consequences in adult neurons in regard to heterochromatin formation, cell cycle activation, and neuronal survival. Taken together, our results suggest that pathological tau-induced stabilization of filamentous actin disrupts the LINC complex, which reduces lamin protein levels and causes the nuclear envelope to invaginate. Lamin reduction or dysfunction, in turn, causes constitutive heterochromatin to relax, allowing expression of genes that are normally silenced by heterochromatin and activating the cell cycle in postmitotic neurons, which causes their death.

Our findings suggest that Alzheimer's disease and associated tauopathies are, in fact, acquired neurodegenerative laminopathies. We demonstrate that loss of lamin function can lead directly to age-related neurodegeneration, indicating that basic mechanisms of aging are conserved between neurons and other somatic tissues. The lamin nucleoskeleton is thus a plausible molecular link between aging, the single most important risk factor for developing common neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer's disease, and basic mechanisms of cellular senescence. Functional consequences of nucleoplasmic reticulum expansion in physiological aging and pathological conditions including cancer and Alzheimer's disease remain to be determined, however.

Link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19491034.2016.1183859