An unusual molecule protects nerve cells from degeneration

The chemical structure of collinolactone - An international research team led by Professor Stephanie Grond from the Institute of Organic Chemistry at the University of Tübingen has found that the natural substance collinolactone reduces artificially-induced stress on nerve cells, protecting them from the kind of damage that occurs in neurodegenerative diseases. Collinolactone is isolated from soil bacteria, and its chemical structure is identical to that of rhizolutin, which was isolated from bacteria on the roots of the Asian medicinal plant ginseng. Last year, a Korean research team discovered in animal experiments that rhizolutin can dissolve the protein aggregations around nerve cells that are characteristic of Alzheimer's disease. The study by Professor Grond and her team has been published in the journal Angewandte Chemie . The dementia caused by Alzheimer's accounts for 50 to 75 percent of cases of neurodegenerative diseases in which the nerve cells of the central nervous system are gradually destroyed. Typical of this as yet incurable disease are malformed protein deposits outside the nerve cells in the brain, consisting of misfolded amyloid beta proteins and tangled tau proteins. Most of the more than one hundred candidate compounds that have been clinically tested since 2003 for their ability to dissolve Alzheimer's plaques have proven useless.