A research team at Academia Sinica yesterday announced its findings on research into a protection mechanism in the brain cells of flies, which might shed light on treatment of human neurological disorders.
The team led by Academia Sinica Institute of Cellular and Organismic Biology assistant research fellow Chou Ya-hui (周雅惠) spent seven years researching the mechanism.
By studying the olfactory local interneurons of drosophila, a genus of fly, the research team identified a model system to investigate the pathological changes and death of neurons through genetic screening, Chou said.
Photo: CNA
Cultivating nearly 5,000 vials of drosophila in the laboratory, team members used carbon dioxide to kill the flies and dissected them using microscopes, she said, adding that the life cycle of a drosophila is about 10 days.
Stimulating the fly larvae with certain neural signals, the team found some of their interneurons underwent cell death, while others remained unaffected and grew into the neurons of adult flies, which led the team to uncover a protection mechanism in the brains of the flies, she said.
As the mechanism might be used to prevent unwanted cell death, the research might shed a new light on treating human neurological disorders, such as Parkinson’s disease, Chou said, but added that more research is needed before a new drug could be developed to activate the mechanism.
The team’s research was detailed in a paper titled “Diverse populations of local interneurons integrate into the drosophila adult olfactory circuit,” which was published in the journal Nature Communications on June 8.
Chou’s research assistant Liou Nan-fu (劉南甫), who graduated from National Taiwan University’s Department of Life Science, is the first author of the paper, which also includes contributions by fellow researcher Tsai Kuo-ting (蔡國鼎), who graduated from National Kaohsiung Normal University’s Department of Physics.
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