Original story from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MA, USA). Chemists have determined the structure of the fuzzy coat that surrounds tau proteins. Learning more about this structure could help scientists find ways to block tau from forming tangles in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients. One of the hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease is the clumping of proteins called tau, which form tangled fibrils in the brain. The more severe the clumping, the more advanced the disease is. The tau protein, which has also been linked to many other neurodegenerative diseases, is unstructured in its normal state, but in the pathological state, it consists of a well-ordered rigid core surrounded by floppy segments. These disordered segments form a ‘fuzzy coat’ that helps determine how tau interacts with other molecules. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT; MA, USA) chemists have now shown, for the first time, they can use nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy to decipher the structure of this fuzzy coat. They hope their findings will aid efforts to develop drugs that interfere with tau buildup in the brain. “If you want to disaggregate these tau fibrils with small-molecule drugs, then these drugs have to penetrate this fuzzy coat,” explained Mei Hong, an MIT professor of chemistry and the senior author of the new study. “That would be an important future endeavor.” MIT graduate student Jia Yi Zhang is the lead author of the paper, which appears today in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Former MIT postdoc Aurelio Dregni is also an…
