New enzyme tied to tangles in Alzheimer's disease
...rmally, tau'sjob is assembling and maintaining the microtubules that stretch from one end ofthe nerve cell to the ...distorted tau cannot maintain themicrotubules. The microtubules fall apart, infering with a nerve's crucialfunction of transmitting signals. Clogging up the works e......naddition to shoring up the scaffolding of a cell, microtubules also form thebasis of an intracellular transport s...normal tau, for example, mightbe able to stabilize microtubules to slow or stop disease progression. Taxol,better known as an anti-cancer agent, works by stabilizin......le proteins correctly. The inability to bind to microtubules may cause microtubules to collapse, saidWilhelmsen. This, in turn, would destabilize axons, which are normallysupported by...Duke Study Helps Explain How Cells Divvy Up Genes During Reproduction
... a highway system made of microscopic tubes called microtubules inside thecell. Kinesin motors do everything from delivering chemical messages to helpingcells divide. But Endow's motor, Ncd, was odd. It seemed to run in reverse. All theother discovered kinesins shuttled cargo in one direction along themi......intracellulartransport. The formation-shifting of microtubules is made possible by theflexibility of tubulin whic...ubulin proteins under the same conditions in which microtubules are formedexcept for the additional presence of zinc. The zinc prevents tubulin chainsfrom curling ...