New Delhi, A cell’s automatic waste clearance may now be externally manipulated, potentially helping researchers understand cell cleansing in cancer or Parkinson’s disease, where the process is known to go awry, a study has shown.
The study was conducted by researchers at New Delhi’s Council of Scientific and Industrial Research -Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology and National Institute of Immunology, Ashoka University in Sonepat and the US’ University of California Los Angeles. “This is a study largely to say that autophagy, a cell’s cleansing process, can be a very relevant therapeutic target. It can now be modulated, and anything which can be changed, you can study it in the disease condition. “So, the study is a fundamental one, with the next step having a potential direct therapeutic implication. These include Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Huntington’s diseases.
Because the moment you switch it off, you can now see what is happening in cancer or Parkinson’s disease,” Thukral told PTI.
“Autophagy is significantly linked with neurodegenerative disorders, including Parkinson’s disease, and cancer,” corresponding author on the study Lipi Thukral, a computational biologist, senior principal scientist and associate professor at CSIR-IGIB, Academy of Scientific and Innovative Research , said. We have also put out international patents for these engineered proteins,” she said. Ravi Manjithaya, an autophagy researcher and professor and chair of the molecular biology and genetics unit, Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Bengaluru, described the study as a “tour de force” that combines computational analysis with rigorous experimental validation. “It is therefore a tour de force study not one that relies solely on computational predictions, but one that takes the findings through the entire spectrum of structural analysis, biochemical validation and cellular experiments,” he added. One of the most immediate areas where such an approach could have implications is neurodegeneration, particularly diseases in which the accumulation of misfolded proteins or damaged mitochondria the energy-producing organelles of cells is a central problem, according to Manjithaya.
