Yeast offers clues to Parkinson’s disease

WASHINGTON - Yeast can be simple model to study molecular basis of Parkinson’s disease, says a scientist.

Dr Tiago Fleming Outeiro from the Instituto de Medicina Molecular in Lisbon, Portugal says yeast could be a powerful ally in the discovery of new therapeutic drugs to treat Parkinson’s disease, a neurodegenerative disorder without any known cure.

The symptoms, which include rigidity, difficulty in initiating movements and resting tremors, are all related to the specific death of dopamine-producing neurons in the brain.

These neurons characteristically contain protein deposits, known as Lewy bodies. A small protein called alpha-synclein is the main component of these deposits.

Outeiro explains how baker’s yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, is helping researchers learn how alpha-synuclein might lead to Parkinson’s disease.

“Yeast is a very simple but powerful model in which to study how alpha-synuclein actually works as, remarkably, many of the biochemical pathways involved are similar between yeast and humans,” he said.

“There is still a lot we don’t know about the function of this protein, but we do know that even small increases in the level of alpha-synuclein in cells lead to cell death,” he added.

Dr Outeiro, along with colleagues in the USA, screened a library of 115,000 small compounds to try and identify those that are able to block the toxic effects of alpha-synuclein.

Several of these molecules have proved effective in preventing Parkinson’s disease in worms and blocking alpha-synuclein toxicity in rat neurons. If developed further, they could form the basis of future drugs to treat Parkinson’s disease in humans.

The work has been presented at the Society for General Microbiology’s autumn meeting in Nottingham. (ANI)