14 DAY TRIAL // A team of researchers led by scientists from the University of Leicester found a potential new approach for curbing this neurodegenerative genetic disorder, thanks to state of the art genetic techniques.
Interestingly enough, the team of biological scientists working at Leicester, used baker's yeast to look at different aspects of Huntington’s disease.
You might think that there is no connection between yeast and the disease but these yeast have very precise characteristics as well as strong and facile genetics which allow researchers to rapidly analyze this system at a genome-wide level.
As a matter of fact, research in recent years has shown that baker's yeast can be used to study mechanisms underlying disease pathology.
This simple organism has been used to identify a few promising candidate drug targets for neurodegenerative disorders, Huntington’s disease included.
“My research group is interested in using genetics and genomics approaches to better understand the fatal neurodegenerative disorders of Huntington’s disease and Parkinson’s disease,” said Flaviano Giorgini, lead author of the research paper at the University of Leicester.
“By clarifying the genes and cellular pathways involved in these diseases we hope to identify novel strategies for treatment and therapy of these disorders.
“In our work we use simple, yet powerful genetic organisms such as baker’s yeast and fruit flies to model aspects of these devastating diseases.
“In the current study we have used a novel functional genomics profiling approach to identify genes which can protect these simple organisms from disease symptoms.
“We then used computational approaches to uncover a network of interactions amongst these genes, which has shed light on the mechanisms underlying this disorder.”
This approach allowed scientists to realize that many of the protective genes are involved in a cellular process called translation, in which messenger RNA (mRNA) is decoded by the ribosomes to produce specific proteins.
On one side, the whole thing is rather intriguing since it's the first time that this process is involved in Huntington's disease, and on the other side it's very important since recent work concluded that pharmacological modulation of translation could be a promising method for treating Parkinson’s disease.
“Our research has taken advantage of cutting edge genomics approaches using a simple model organism to identify a novel area for potential therapeutic intervention for Huntington’s disease,” said Dr Giorgini, of the Department of Genetics.
“If our findings are validated by further studies, it might suggest a novel therapeutic approach for this devastating disorder - which is critical as currently there are no treatments for onset or progression of symptoms.”
The University of Leicester led scientists from the University of Lisbon (led by Dr Tiago Outeiro) and University of California at San Francisco (led by Dr Paul Muchowski), and this work was funded by the Medical Research Council and is published in The Journal of Biological Chemistry.