Parkinson's Disease

Parkinson's Disease is an incurable neurodegenerative disease characterized by a progressive loss of dopaminergic neurons that leads to slowness of movement, muscle rigidity, and tremors. Insoluble aggregates of proteins such as alpha-synuclein accumulate in the affected neurons, which also appear to be subject to oxidative stress. This collection from Cold Spring Harbor Perspectives in Medicine discusses recent work that has begun to uncover the molecular mechanisms that underlie the condition, including studies that implicate dysfunction of mitochondrial proteins such as parkin and pink1.