A team of researchers, led by Marc Freeman, Ph.D., an early career scientist with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and associate professor of neurobiology at the University of Massachusetts Medical School has discovered a gene in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster that, when mutant, blocks the self-destruction of damaged axons, which could hold clues to treating motor neuron diseases, such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), aslo known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. ALS also afflicts legendary physicist Dr. Stephen Hawking (photo). A neuron has a very distinctive form – a bush of dendrites that receive signals, an incredibly long axon, which is like a long tail, and "a little dot" between them that is the cell body, housing the genetic headquarters. Every part of the neuron is required for it to transmit messages. "If anything breaks along any part of the neuron, the cell unplugs from the circuit and no longer functions," explained Dr. Freeman, who presented this research at the Genetics Society of America's 54th Annual Drosophila Research Conference in Washington, D.C. The work was announced on April 8, 2013. Once the long tail-like axon is damaged, it shrivels away, basically self-destructing, and resulting in neurons that no longer operate. This catastrophic damage can happen in several ways: from inflammation, a neurodegenerative disease, a metabolic disorder such as diabetes, toxin exposure, or tumor growth. Such axon loss is thought to be a primary factor that leads to functional loss in patients with neurological disorders – it is equivalent to going into an electrical circuit and randomly cutting wires.Login Or Register To Read Full Story