Combatting Neurodegenerative Disease by Advancing Research in Cellular Metabolism and Axon Maintenance
Activating Mutations of Sarm1 Enriched in ALS
Sarm1 mutations are not common in ALS patients, but a careful examination of the ones that do occur by Dr. Joseph Bloom and colleagues has shown that they tend to cause Sarm1 to be constitutively active and occur more frequently in ALS patients than in the general population. This research, published in Molecular Neurodegeneration, suggests […]
Protein structure studies demonstrate how SARM1 senses cellular energy status to trigger axon degeneration
Two recent articles published by Needleman Center researchers dissect the structure of SARM1, an enzyme responsible for initiating programmed axon degeneration, and shed light on how the balance of key cellular metabolites regulate its activity. SARM1 forms an octamer in which each monomer contains an N-terminal autoinhibitory domain, domains that mediate multimerization, and a C-terminal […]