Zombie Cells

Parkinson’s disease is a neurodegenerative condition affecting cells in a part of the brain called the substantia nigra, which regulates movement. It’s thought that death of these neurons causes the characteristic body tremors and rigidity seen in Parkinson’s patients, but new research suggests the cells don’t actually die. Rather, they enter an undead, zombie-like state known as senescence. In tissues of the body where cells proliferate continuously, senescence is common, but the non-replicating neurons of the brain weren’t thought to adopt such a state. As well as shutting down functions, the senescent cells (stained red, here, in the brain of a model mouse) trigger local activation of immune cells (green), which can cause further damage. Importantly, researchers have identified a factor that controls both the zombie state and inflammation. Targeting this factor therapeutically could thus provide a way to halt the march of the undead and potentially defeat the disease.

Written by Ruth Williams

Ruth Williams

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Ruth is a freelance science journalist based in the US. She's a regular correspondent for The Scientist, and her work has appeared in The Lancet, Nature, Scientific American Mind, BBC Focus and elsewhere. Twitter @rooph

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• Image from the Laboratory of Molecular and Cellular Neuroscience at The Rockefeller University
• Laboratory of Molecular and Cellular Neuroscience, The Rockefeller University, New York, NY, USA
• Image copyright held by the original authors
• Research published in Cell Stem Cell, October 2019