Moribund Mitochondrial Respiration Prior to Plaques

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The brain's metabolism starts to wane decades before Alzheimer's symptoms. Why the energy deficit? Scientists led by Andrés Norambuena and George Bloom at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, blame failure of a specific type of mitochondrial respiration called nutrient-induced mitochondrial activation. NiMA, they write in a bioRxiv preprint posted on February 4, weakens in mouse models of amyloidosis a year before plaques appear. They believe Aβ oligomers stifle mitochondria by activating GSK3β, a kinase linked to AD. “Disruption of NiMA in the brain could be a very early event in AD pathogenesis in humans,” the authors wrote. Read full story.