Losing Contacts

Like detectives piecing together the moments leading up to a crime, researchers have unpicked the events that result in the destruction of nerves in the muscle wasting disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Connections between muscles and the nerves that stimulate them called neuromuscular junctions (NMJs) are lost early on in ALS. And in this study the team probed whether this is down to entire nerves suddenly dying or the dismantling of nerve branches along which the NMJs reside. They used fluorescent microscopy to repeatedly image the nerves, muscle fibres (pictured in red and green) and NMJs of normal (left) and ALS mice (right) revealing that NMJ loss was due to individual branches disassembling before total nerve degeneration. This presents a window of time, between the first signs of disease with NMJ loss and eventual nerve death, for targeting efforts to treat ALS.

Written by Lux Fatimathas

Lux Fatimathas

Writer

Having pursued science through a career in research, communications and publishing, she is currently a writer and editor for a healthcare marketing agency and also juggles freelance science writing.

• Image from work by Éric Martineau and colleagues
• Département de neurosciences, Université de Montréal, Montreal, Canada
• Image originally published under a Creative Commons Licence (BY 4.0)
• Published in eLife, October 2018