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22 Dec 2020
Aggregated tau spreads through mouse brain by passing from one cell to the next, one theory goes, but how does it get in? In the November 27 Brain, researchers led by Tsuneya Ikezu at Boston University reported that tau oligomers infiltrate neurons more readily when they can hitch a ride inside extracellular vesicles. The authors isolated vesicles from Alzheimer’s and control brains, and found that only the former contained the oligomers. When injected into old wild-type mice, these AD vesicles sparked tauopathy, even though the amount of aggregated tau in the vesicles was minuscule. Injecting the same amount of free oligomeric or fibrillar tau, isolated from the same donor brains, had no effect on mouse brains. Vesicle-bound tau spreads more efficiently than free forms, Ikezu concluded.