Scientists identify molecule that could help treat Parkinson's naturemethods nature
: one that helps promote action and the other that inhibits action," said senior author Haining Zhong, Ph.D., scientist with the OHSU Vollum Institute."Dopamine promotes the first circuit to enable movement, and adenosine is the 'brake' that promotes the second circuit and brings balance to the system."
The discovery could immediately suggest new avenues of drug development to treat symptoms of Parkinson's disease, a movement disorder where the loss of dopamine-producing cells has been widely implicated as a cause. Scientists have long suspected that dopamine is influenced by an opposing dynamic of neuronal signaling in the striatum—a critical region of the brain that mediates movement along with reward, motivation and learning. The striatum is also the primary brain region affected in Parkinson's disease by the loss of dopamine-producing cells.
"People for a long time suspected there has to be this push-pull system," said co-author Tianyi Mao, Ph.D., a scientist at the Vollum who happens to be married to Zhong. In the new study, researchers for the first time clearly and definitively revealed adenosine as the neurotransmitter that acts in an oppositional sense with dopamine. The study, involving mice, used novel genetically engineered protein probes recently developed in the Zhong and Mao labs.
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