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Ivan Scheblykin. Portrait.

Ivan Scheblykin

Professor

Ivan Scheblykin. Portrait.

2D polarization imaging as a low-cost fluorescence method to detect α-synuclein aggregation ex vivo in models of Parkinson’s disease

Author

  • Rafael Camacho
  • Daniela Täuber
  • Christian Hansen
  • Juanzi Shi
  • Luc Bousset
  • Ronald Melki
  • Jia-Yi Li
  • Ivan Scheblykin

Summary, in English

A hallmark of Parkinson’s disease is the formation of large protein-rich aggregates in neurons, where α-synuclein is the most abundant protein. A standard approach to visualize aggregation is to fluorescently label the proteins of interest. Then, highly fluorescent regions are assumed to contain aggregated proteins. However, fluorescence brightness alone cannot discriminate micrometer-sized regions with high expression of non-aggregated proteins from regions where the proteins are aggregated on the molecular scale. Here, we demonstrate that 2-dimensional polarization imaging can discriminate between preformed non-aggregated and aggregated forms of α-synuclein, and detect increased aggregation in brain tissues of transgenic mice. This imaging method assesses homo-FRET between labels by measuring fluorescence polarization in excitation and emission simultaneously, which translates into higher contrast than fluorescence anisotropy imaging. Exploring earlier aggregation states of α-synuclein using such technically simple imaging method could lead to crucial improvements in our understanding of α-synuclein-mediated pathology in Parkinson’s Disease.

Department/s

  • Chemical Physics
  • MultiPark: Multidisciplinary research on neurodegenerative diseases
  • Molecular Neurobiology
  • NanoLund: Centre for Nanoscience
  • Neural Plasticity and Repair

Publishing year

2018

Language

English

Publication/Series

Communications Biology

Volume

1

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

Nature Publishing Group

Topic

  • Biophysics
  • Medical Biotechnology
  • Biological Sciences
  • Clinical Laboratory Medicine

Status

Published

Research group

  • Molecular Neurobiology
  • Neural Plasticity and Repair

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 2399-3642