UMMS Affiliation

Department of Neurology

Publication Date

2020-08-06

Document Type

Article

Disciplines

Congenital, Hereditary, and Neonatal Diseases and Abnormalities | Lipids | Nervous System | Nervous System Diseases | Neurology | Neuroscience and Neurobiology | Nutritional and Metabolic Diseases

Abstract

Sandhoff disease (SD) is a lysosomal storage disease, caused by loss of beta-hexosaminidase (HEX) activity resulting in the accumulation of ganglioside GM2. There are shared features between SD and Parkinson's disease (PD). alpha-synuclein (aSYN) inclusions, the diagnostic hallmark sign of PD, are frequently found in the brain in SD patients and HEX knockout mice, and HEX activity is reduced in the substantia nigra in PD. In this study, we biochemically demonstrate that HEX deficiency in mice causes formation of high-molecular weight (HMW) aSYN and ubiquitin in the brain. As expected from HEX enzymatic function requirements, overexpression in vivo of HEXA and B combined, but not either of the subunits expressed alone, increased HEX activity as evidenced by histochemical assays. Biochemically, such HEX gene expression resulted in increased conversion of GM2 to its breakdown product GM3. In a neurodegenerative model of overexpression of aSYN in rats, increasing HEX activity by AAV6 gene transfer in the substantia nigra reduced aSYN embedding in lipid compartments and rescued dopaminergic neurons from degeneration. Overall, these data are consistent with a paradigm shift where lipid abnormalities are central to or preceding protein changes typically associated with PD.

Keywords

Lipid binding, Neuroprotection, Parkinson’s disease, Sandhoff disease, α-Synuclein, β-Hexosaminidase

Rights and Permissions

Copyright © The Author(s) 2020. Open Access: This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.

DOI of Published Version

10.1186/s40478-020-01004-6

Source

Brekk OR, Korecka JA, Crapart CC, Huebecker M, MacBain ZK, Rosenthal SA, Sena-Esteves M, Priestman DA, Platt FM, Isacson O, Hallett PJ. Upregulating β-hexosaminidase activity in rodents prevents α-synuclein lipid associations and protects dopaminergic neurons from α-synuclein-mediated neurotoxicity. Acta Neuropathol Commun. 2020 Aug 6;8(1):127. doi: 10.1186/s40478-020-01004-6. PMID: 32762772; PMCID: PMC7409708. Link to article on publisher's site

Journal/Book/Conference Title

Acta neuropathologica communications

Related Resources

Link to Article in PubMed

PubMed ID

32762772

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Download

Share

COinS