Illuminating MS

Multiple sclerosis (MS) develops when the immune system attacks myelin, the fatty substance that insulates nerve cells. The disease often lurks undetected long before any symptoms appear, but scientists might have come up with a method for early diagnosis. Using a fluorescent tag to track a protein called thrombin in mice with an MS-like disease, they found that thrombin was most active precisely in the areas where damage to myelin was most severe. Here, high thrombin activity is shown in red in the spinal columns of diseased mice (left three), in contrast to those of healthy control mice (right three). So heightened thrombin activity appears to herald myelin depletion and nerve cell damage, meaning that this thrombin-specific fluorescent tag could potentially be used as an early-detection method for MS. It might also be employed to monitor how patients respond to treatments.

Written by Daniel Cossins

Daniel Cossins

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As a freelance science writer, Dan's work has been published in award-winning magazines including BBC Focus, Wired UK, Cosmos, BBC Knowledge, BBC History and Men's Health.

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• Image courtesy of Katerina Akassoglou and colleagues
• Gladstone Institutes, USA
• Copyright held by original authors
• Research reported in Annals of Neurology, December 2013