Membrane anchor suppresses protein aggregation in neurodegenerative diseases, modeling study shows

Protein aggregation is typical of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and prion diseases such as Creutzfeld-Jakob disease. A research team headed by Professor Jörg Tatzelt from the Department of Biochemistry of Neurodegenerative Diseases at Ruhr University Bochum, Germany, has now used new in vitro and cell culture models to show that a lipid anchor on the outer membrane of nerve cells inhibits the aggregation of the prion protein.