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Science 15 June 2001:
Vol. 292. no. 5524, pp. 1983 - 1984
DOI: 10.1126/science.292.5524.1983a
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News of the Week

NEURODEGENERATIVE DISEASE:
Using the Fruit Fly to Model Tau Malfunction

Dan Ferber

In work published online by Science on 14 June (www.sciencexpress.org), researchers show that fruit flies producing the human tau protein--which forms part of abnormal intracellular structures called tangles seen in the brains of patients with Alzheimer's disease and certain other dementias--undergo brain neuron degeneration. But in a surprising finding, the dying fly neurons do not contain tangles. Some researchers suggest that the results indicate that defective tau proteins can kill neurons without forming tangles; others caution, however, that the lack of tangles might mean that flies aren't a good model of human dementias.

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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)