Unlocking a mystery of Huntington's disease in space

April 21, 2014  23:46

An experiment just launched into orbit by a team of Caltech researchers could be an important step toward understanding a devastating neurodegenerative disease, Medical Xpress reports.

Huntington's disease is a grim diagnosis. A hereditary disorder with debilitating physical and cognitive symptoms, the disease usually robs adult patients of their ability to walk, balance, and speak. More than 15 years ago, researchers revealed the disorder's likely cause—an abnormal version of the protein huntingtin; however, the mutant protein's mechanism is poorly understood, and the disease remains untreatable.

Now, a new project led by Pamela Bjorkman, Max Delbrück Professor of Biology, will investigate whether the huntingtin protein can form crystals in microgravity aboard the International Space Station (ISS)—crystals that are crucial for understanding the molecular structure of the protein. The experiment was launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida on Friday, April 18 aboard the SpaceX CRS-3 cargo resupply mission to the ISS. On Sunday, April 20 the station's robotic arm captured the mission's payload, which included the proteins for Bjorkman's experiment—which is the first Caltech experiment to take place aboard the ISS.

In the experiment, the researchers hope to grow a crystal of the huntingtin protein—the crystal would be an organized, latticelike arrangement of the protein's molecules—which is needed to determine the molecular structure of the protein. However, molecules of the huntingtin protein tend to aggregate, or clump together, in Earth's gravity. And this disordered arrangement makes it incredibly hard to parse the protein's structure, says Gwen Owens, a graduate student in Bjorkman's lab and a researcher who helped design the study.

Researchers have previously studied small fragments of crystallized huntingtin, but because of its large size and propensity to clumping, no one has ever successfully grown a crystal of the full-length protein large enough to analyze with X-ray crystallography. To understand what the protein does—and how defects in it lead to the symptoms of Huntington's disease—the researchers need to study the full-length protein.

As the crystals grow larger over a period of several months, samples will come back to Earth via the SpaceX CRS-4 return mission. After analyzing crystals of the full-length protein with X-ray crystallography, the researchers could finally determine huntingtin's structure—information that will be crucial to developing treatments for Huntington's disease.

 

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