Seeking the Source

One of the key biological hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease is the presence of clumps of amyloid molecules in the brain, known as plaques. For many years, researchers have focused on figuring out why amyloid plaques form and how to get rid of them, yet these efforts haven’t led to effective treatments for what is currently an incurable condition. One issue is that amyloid is not only made in the brain but elsewhere in the body too, so it has been hard to figure out where it’s coming from. Researchers have recently managed to disentangle the two sources by using genetically engineered mice that make mouse amyloid in the brain and human amyloid in the liver. The human liver amyloid could still get into the brain (highlighted in red in these brains scans), triggering changes typically seen in Alzheimer’s disease and challenging our understanding of how the disease starts and progresses.

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 Virginie Lam, Ryusuke Takechi and John C. L. Mamo, and colleagues
• Curtin Health Innovation Research Institute, Faculty of Health Sciences, Curtin University, Bentley, WA, Australia
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in PLOS Biology, September 2021