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Technology that uses a less known sensory system to substitute for olfaction could one day help anosmic people detect some odors

Both microtubule-binding protein tau and RNA-binding protein TDP-43 have been associated with neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease, including in co-pathological deposition with each other, but how they interact biophysically and pathologically has been challenging to evaluate. In this issue of The EMBO Journal, Simonetti and colleagues show how tau and TDP-43 directly interact both in phase separation and pathologically associated seeding, resulting in enhanced TDP-43...

Parkinson's disease (PD) is an increasingly prevalent neurodegenerative disorder, largely sporadic in origin, with limited understanding of age- and region-specific lipid alterations in the human brain. Dysregulation of glycosphingolipid catabolism has been implicated in PD, yet comprehensive spatiotemporal profiling remains sparse. Here, we performed targeted lipidomics across eight anatomically distinct brain regions in post-mortem controls, mid-stage, and late-stage PD cases using...

Dementia is a defining feature of Lewy body disease: its timing and onset distinguish different clinical diagnoses, and its effect on quality of life is profound. However, it remains unclear whether processes leading to cognitive and motor symptoms in Lewy body disease differ. To clarify this, we use in-vivo neuroimaging to assess spatial gradients of inter-regional differences in structural and functional connectivity in 108 people across the Lewy body disease spectrum (46 Parkinson's with...

Aging impairs hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs), driving clonal hematopoiesis, myeloid malignancies, and immune decline. The role of lysosomes in HSC aging-beyond their passive mediation of autophagy-is unclear. We show that lysosomes in aged HSCs are hyperacidic, depleted, damaged, and aberrantly activated. Single-cell transcriptomics and functional analyses reveal that suppression of hyperactivated lysosomes using a vacuolar ATPase (v-ATPase) inhibitor restores lysosomal integrity and metabolic...