Clearing Clutter

When enough unwanted paper and rubbish accumulates on your desk, it can impede productivity. Hard workers inside our body can be crowded out too, and a study has shown that centrosomes – organisational centres of the cell, which choreograph the production of structural microtubules – can be overrun by accumulations of protein. This dangerous clutter is found in patients with neurological conditions like Parkinson’s, and was long known to form near the centrosome. Now it's clear that they obstruct the centrosome’s essential work, preventing the growth of microtubules in experiments (bottom row), compared to healthy cells (top row, with red network seen rapidly regrowing in the right panel). Without the microtubules, nerve cells lose structure and function, and can ultimately die, leading to the devastating symptoms we associate with neurological disease. Identifying ways to protect the centrosome and clean up the accumulations could provide new ways of improving the outlook for patients.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image adapted from work by Anila Iqbal and colleagues
• Centre for Biomedical Sciences, Department of Biological Sciences, Royal Holloway University of London, Egham, Surrey, UK
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Biology Open, October 2020