Power Lunch

Around 145,000 people in the UK are currently living with Parkinson’s disease. It’s a progressive and incurable brain disorder that affects movement and causes other issues such as insomnia, dementia and mental health problems. Yet despite years of research, we still understand little about what causes it. One possible culprit could be mitochondria – the small structures inside cells that produce energy. During the normal course of life, worn out mitochondria are ‘eaten up’ through a process called mitophagy (highlighted in orange in this image of mouse kidney tissue) and replaced with healthy new ones. Researchers have discovered that mitophagy doesn’t work properly in brain cells from genetically engineered mice with a version of Parkinson’s and might be causing some of the problems seen in the disease. Excitingly, they have also shown that mitophagy can be restarted using certain chemicals, which could one day be developed into much-needed treatments for patients.

Written by Kat Arney

Kat Arney

Writer

Dr Kat Arney is an award-winning science writer, broadcaster and public speaker, and is the founder and Creative Director of First Create The Media.

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• Image from work by Francois Singh and colleagues
• MRC Protein Phosphorylation and Ubiquitylation Unit, University of Dundee, Dundee, UK
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in eLife, August 2021