All great wines and whiskys are matured, some for many many years. Ageing in this way allows time for complex chemical interactions that improves their quality. Although the maturation process for my latest scientific publication wasn’t quite as long as a quality Single Malt (traditionally 12 – 21 years, in case you were curious), there were times where it felt as though I was never going to get to crack open the barrel! But, here we are – and with that, the remainder of my PhD research is finally published.
I will do my best to not bore you with the details, and instead try to distil 4 years of research, experiments, writing, revisions, more experiments and more revisions into a succinct description of why this paper is important. But first, if you haven’t already found it, I recommend looking here for a little context.
AIM: To examine the ability of the small heat shock molecular chaperone proteins to interact with higher order aggregates (oligomers and fibrils) of alpha-synuclein, whose aggregation is associated with Parkinson’s Disease.
NOTABLE METHODS: Single molecule total internal reflection fluorescence (TIRF) microscopy – allows us to visualise directly the chaperone proteins interacting with fibrillar alpha-synuclein, reactive oxygen cell toxicity assay to monitor the impact of fibrillar alpha-synuclein on live cells in the presence and absence of chaperone.
THE BEST BITS: Directly visualising the interaction between a small heat shock molecular chaperone protein and alpha-synuclein fibrils. While this wasn’t the version that made it into the manuscript, it’s one of my personal favourite science images so far!
TIRF image of fibrils (blue, green, yellow), with bound chaperone (red)
TAKE HOME MESSAGE: Small heat shock proteins have multiple mechanisms of interacting with potentially toxic proteins. These molecular chaperones are well-suited to intervening at various stages in the aggregation pathway to protect cells from toxicity.
If you’d like to read the full article, or maybe check out a few more pretty pictures, you can find it here.
