Certain metabolic products are suitable as indication for Parkinson’s disease. Researchers and MBExC members at the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Multidisciplinary Sciences, the University Medical Center Göttingen (UMG), and the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE) have used this insight in a first step to develop a new diagnostics approach. The prerequisite for the discovery is a method developed by Max Planck researcher Stefan Glöggler that specifically visualizes metabolic molecules in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) by signal amplification.
The figure shows a cell with excessive alpha-synuclein (left) compared to a cell, where alpha-synuclein was genetically switched off (right). The cell nucleus is colored blue, the protein alpha-synuclein yellow.© Felipe Opazo / UMG
