Pathology in Human Tissue

To determine if our discoveries from flies and mammalian cells are relevant to humans we examine tissue from patients with motor neuron disease. The example above shows a disease aggregate of the protein called TDP-43 (magenta) in a patient with motor neuron disease. We see a second protein, called PABPC-1 (above in green), in the same protein aggregate. This tells us that PABPC1 is dysfunctional in disease and raises the possibility that PABPC-1 regulates the aggregation of TDP-43.