New Delhi, Oct 2 (NationPress) Researchers have made a groundbreaking discovery by directly visualizing how Parkinson's disease is 'triggered' in human brain tissue for the first time.

Employing a novel technique known as ASA-PD (Advanced Sensing of Aggregates for Parkinson's Disease), scientists from the University of Cambridge and University College London, UK, successfully observed, quantified, and compared alpha-synuclein oligomers—the protein clusters implicated in the disease—in human brain samples.

These oligomers have been suspected to play a central role in the onset of Parkinson's, yet their detection in human brain tissue had remained elusive until now.

Utilizing ASA-PD in conjunction with ultra-sensitive fluorescence microscopy, the research team was able to identify and analyze millions of oligomers in post-mortem brain samples.

Dr. Rebecca Andrews, who performed this research as a postdoctoral researcher at Cambridge's Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry, commented, 'This is the first time we’ve been able to look at oligomers directly in human brain tissue at this scale: it’s like being able to see stars in broad daylight.'

She further stated, 'It opens new doors in Parkinson's research.'

Given the minuscule size of oligomers, their signals are typically weak. However, ASA-PD enhances the signal while minimizing background noise, significantly improving sensitivity to the extent that individual alpha-synuclein oligomers can be observed and examined.

The team analyzed post-mortem brain tissue samples from patients with Parkinson's disease and compared them with those from healthy individuals of the same age.

The findings, published in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering, revealed that oligomers were present in both healthy and Parkinson's brains. The primary distinction was that oligomers in diseased brains were larger, more luminous, and more numerous, indicating a potential link to the progression of Parkinson's.

Additionally, the researchers identified a sub-class of oligomers exclusive to Parkinson's patients, which could serve as the earliest visible indicators of the disease, potentially years before symptoms manifest.

Professor Lucien Weiss from Polytechnique Montréal, who co-led the study, remarked, 'Oligomers have been the needle in the haystack, but now that we know where those needles are, it could help us target specific cell types in certain regions of the brain.'

He emphasized that similar methodologies could be applied to other neurodegenerative conditions, such as Alzheimer's and Huntington's.