Congratulations to Avinash, Kate, and colleagues for their recent publication in Cell! This work, a close collaboration between our lab and Simon Alberti’s lab, focuses on a protein called FUS, which is implicated in ALS (also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease). By using in vitro and in vivo studies, they show that FUS normally forms liquid compartments. However, when these compartments are “aged” in vitro, they convert into solid aggregates, and this conversion is accelerated by mutations derived from patients with ALS. Importantly, they propose that these aberrant liquid-to-solid phase transitions may be at the heart of many neurodegenerative diseases.
A Liquid-to-Solid Phase Transition of the ALS Protein FUS Accelerated by Disease Mutation Patel A, Lee HO, Jawerth L, Maharana S, Jahnel M, Hein MY, Stoynov S, Mahamid J, Saha S, Franzmann TM, Pozniakovski A, Poser I, Maghelli N, Royer LA, Weigert M, Myers EW, Grill S, Drechsel D, Hyman AA, Alberti S. Cell, 27 August 2015.
Read the MPI-CBG Press Release, and watch our Cell PaperFlick video abstract!