Scientists at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute have discovered a set of brain proteins responsible for some of the most common and devastating brain diseases.
The proteins underlie epilepsy, depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disease, mental retardation and neurodegenerative diseases including Alzheimer's and Huntington's diseases.
"The reason such a remarkable number of diseases are relevant to this set of proteins is that these proteins are at the heart of how brain cells function," explains Professor Seth Grant, Director of the Genes to Cognition Programme at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute.
Rather than taking traditional methods for studying just one protein at a time, the researchers developed a method that finds whole sets of proteins that bind to each other and form microscopic molecular machines. They were hunting for the 'engine room' of nerve cells, which is known to be inside the connections between nerve cells called synapses.
Synapses join the billions of nerve cells together in the brain and they are the location where learning and memory and many other behaviours are controlled.
"We developed a new method, which led to this discovery," says Dr Jyoti Choudhary, leader of the Proteomic Mass Spectrometry team, which collaborated with Professor Grant's team on the study, "and it should be equally useful in finding the basis of many other diseases in other cells and tissues of the body."
To find this key set of proteins - called MASCs (a scientific acronym for MAGUK Associated Signaling Complexes and pronounced 'mask') - the researchers adapted a method that had previously been used in yeast cells.