JBC News Podcast: α-synuclein, living cells and Parkinson’s disease: JBC’s best Cell Biology article of 2013

Summary: March 10 2014 — In the last of our four-part podcast series on the best articles of 2013 in the The Journal of Biological Chemistry we hear about the debate surrounding α-synuclein which plays a critical role in Parkinson’s disease Is it an unfolded monomer? Is it a helically-folded tetramer? Paul Fraser a professor of medical biophysics at the University of Toronto and a JBC associate editor speaks with Dennis Selkoe a professor of neurological diseases at Harvard Institutes of Medicine and Ulf Dettmer a research fellow in neurology also at Harvard Selkoe and Dettmer are co-authors of JBC’s best article of 2013 in the Affinity category of Cell Biology It is titled “In Vivo Cross-linking Reveals Principally Oligomeric Forms of α-Synuclein and β-Synuclein in Neurons and Non-neural Cells,” and it was published in March The paper details a new method for cross-linking α-synuclein in living cells that reveals a form consistent with a tetramer In this conversation we hear about the prior research leading to this article and what to look forward to as the debate continues