Unveiling the Surprising Tau Connection in Brain Wasteosomes

Published on March 30, 2023

Imagine brain wasteosomes as little garbage collectors in our heads, rounding up all the junk and keeping our minds clean and tidy. But here’s the catch: these wasteosomes have been a mystery for decades, especially when it comes to their composition and whether they contain tau protein, a major player in Alzheimer’s disease. In this groundbreaking study, scientists took a fresh look at wasteosomes and discovered a methodological hiccup that had been tripping up previous research. It turns out that boiling the wasteosomes during testing actually dissolves their structure and prevents the detection of tau protein. By adjusting the pre-treatment method just right, researchers successfully found traces of tau in wasteosomes from Alzheimer’s patients but not in those from non-Alzheimer’s patients. These findings suggest that wasteosomes have different compositions depending on the neurological condition, shedding new light on their role as essential garbage containers in the brain. Curious to know more? Dive into the full research article!

Brain corpora amylacea, recently renamed as wasteosomes, are polyglucosan bodies that appear during aging and some neurodegenerative conditions. They collect waste substances and are part of a brain cleaning mechanism. For decades, studies on their composition have produced inconsistent results and the presence of tau protein in them has been controversial. In this work, we reanalyzed the presence of this protein in wasteosomes and we pointed out a methodological problem when immunolabeling. It is well known that to detect tau it is necessary to perform an antigen retrieval. However, in the case of wasteosomes, an excessive antigen retrieval with boiling dissolves their polyglucosan structure, releases the entrapped proteins and, thus, prevents their detection. After performing an adequate pre-treatment, with an intermediate time of boiling, we observed that some brain wasteosomes from patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) contained tau, while we did not detect tau protein in those from non-AD patients. These observations pointed the different composition of wasteosomes depending on the neuropathological condition and reinforce the role of wasteosomes as waste containers.

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