Brain stories - Parkinsons disease & perceiving masked emotions

Claire Concannon learns about experiments aimed at slowing Parkinson's Disease progression. Sonia Yee explores research into our perception of emotions in a mask-filled world.

The complexity of the human brain is astounding. Billions of brain cells or neurons forming circuits, with countless connections sharing information. This allows us to perceive the world around us, form complex thoughts, respond and move.

But it also makes it difficult for us to fully understand how the brain will react when things go wrong, or when situations change.

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Protein clumps and Parkinson's disease

Dr Victor Dieriks starts each day with the sound of the tissue culture hood alarm going off. This specialised enclosed bench has an air flow system that is constantly on, designed to keep the bench area as sterile as possible.

A Sir Charles Hercus Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Brain Research in the University of Auckland, Dr Dieriks' daily routine includes changing the media of the dishes containing the cells he is working with, making sure they keep growing until he is ready to do experiments with them.

He works with a type of human brain cell called pericytes, grown from Parkinson's diseased brains that have been donated to the Neurological Foundation Human Brain Bank.

Dr Dieriks is investigating the protein clumps that are found within brain cells in Parkinson's disease sufferers. These clumps are made up of a protein called alpha-synuclein, which under normal circumstances has a role in helping neurons communicate with one another. But when certain environmental factors trigger this protein to form clumps, it can lead to problems.

The alpha-synuclein clumps are toxic to brain cells. Over time the clumps accumulate, exceeding the repair capacity of the brain, causing neurons to die. The clumps also spread throughout the brain, and when specific neurons in a part of the brain called the substania nigra start to die off this leads to the movement dysfunction characteristic of Parkinson's disease. How fast this progresses and what the specific symptoms are varies from patient to patient.

To add further complexity, the clumps can form different shapes to which the cells react differently, and which seems to result in these differences in symptoms and disease progression…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details