Reading Time: 4 minutes Due to the collaboration, hard work and partnerships with people affected by motor neurone disease (MND) who generously take part in research, new pieces of the complex MND puzzle continue to be found. These pieces can come in many forms and one such type of discovery is of the genes that cause MND – in…
Reading Time: 2 minutes Researchers from the Sheffield Institute for Translational Neuroscience (SITraN) at the University of Sheffield have uncovered a new function of the C9orf72 protein. A paper on their work has recently been published in the EMBO Journal. A change or mutation to the C9orf72 gene is linked to about 40% of cases of inherited MND. We…
Reading Time: 2 minutes A team at the Sheffield Institute for Translational Neuroscience are creating a zebrafish model to study the C9orf72 gene mutation in MND, and work out its role in the brain and spinal cord (our reference 864-792). Zebrafish are a good way of modelling what happens in human MND. We know that many of the genes…
Reading Time: 2 minutes Just like when we put out our recycling every week, the cells in our body have their own recycling system too. One of the recycling plants within our motor neurones works by a system called autophagy. In a recently completed research project that the MND Association has funded Dr Rob Layfield and Dr Alice Goode…
Reading Time: 2 minutes Mistakes in a gene known as ALS5, or spatacsin, cause a rare form of inherited MND that develops at a much earlier age than most other forms of the disease. Under supervision from Dr Cahir O’Kane, MND Association funded PhD student Alex Patto has been using fruit flies to understand how mistakes in spatacsin cause…
Reading Time: 3 minutes Following on from the identification of the gene TBK1 as a contributory risk factor for MND in February, the plot thickens further with research published yesterday by Dr Jochen Weishaupt and colleagues. Published in Nature Neuroscience, the team found mutations in the TBK1 gene as a cause of both inherited MND and frontotemporal dementia in Germany…
Reading Time: 3 minutes Growing up in a seaside town in the 1980s led to me spending a lot of my “formative years” in the local amusement arcades, playing iconic video games like Space Invaders (at which I was average) and Asteroids (I was the kid to beat!). One game I never got the hang of was Pac Man,…
