11 November 2025
Following Synthetic Invasion
A rare, rapidly progressing degeneration of the nervous system called multiple-system atrophy (MSA) is caused by infiltration of the brain by 'fibres' of the protein α-synuclein (fibrillar α-syn) with prion-like characteristics. Here, a mouse model of MSA established with synthetic α-syn based on patient fibrils reveals the structure of fibrillar α-syn (seen here in white in a section of the model mouse brain), how it replicates and propagates
Read the published research article here
Written by
- Still from video from work by Domenic Burger, Marianna Kashyrina and Lukas van den Heuvel, and colleagues
- Laboratory of Biological Electron Microscopy, Institute of Physics, School of Basic Science, EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland; Institut des Maladies Neurodégénératives, UMR 5293, Univ. Bordeaux, CNRS, Bordeaux, France
- Video originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution – NonCommercial – NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
- Published in Nature, November 2025
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