Early Signals

The protein aggregations seen in Alzheimer’s disease patients’ brains – the amyloid plaques and tau tangles – can appear well in advance of the cognitive and memory deficits characteristic of the disease. Scientists have identified other early markers too, including translocator protein 18KDa (TSPO) – a neuroinflammatory protein. In the brain specimen pictured, from a mouse engineered to mimic early-onset Alzheimer’s, TSPO (red) is unusually abundant in the microglial cells (blue) that contact amyloid plaques (cyan). Such increased production of TSPO was apparent in the model mice at just six weeks of age – approximately one and a half months before learning deficits were observed. High levels of TSPO are also seen in postmortem brains from Alzheimer’s patients. While it remains to be determined whether the protein is protective or pathological and whether blocking or enhancing it would affect disease progression, TSPO can, together with other markers, serve as an early warning of 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 work by Daniel A. Martinez-Perez and colleagues
• Brain, Behavior & the Environment Program, Department of Environmental Health Sciences, Robert Stempel College of Public Health & Social Work, Florida International University, Miami, FL, USA
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution – NonCommercial – NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
• Published in Acta Neuropathologica, July 2025