Parkinson's disease (PD) is a common neurodegenerative disease more frequently diagnosed among the elderly. It is usually associated with the functional degradation and death of brain dopamine neurons in the substantia nigra region. The Lewy bodies that are frequently found in PD patients’ brains are one of the pathological signs of the disease. The relationship between neuron death and the formation of these inclusive bodies is still unclear and has been under debates.

A research group led by Dr. Zhizhen Wang, a Chinese Academy of Sciences academician and a professor at the Institute of Biophysics, collaborating with another IBP research group led by Professor Renjie Jiao recently found that the histone deacetylase 6 (HDAC6) plays a key regulatory role in the development of Parkinson's disease. In the Drosophila model of their study, flies that are mutant for the dHDAC6 gene show significantly more serious PD-like phenotypes,including death of dopamine neurons, retinal degeneration and movement disorders. Meanwhile, the number of inclusive bodies significantly reduces while the number of soluble oligomers significantly increases.

Their results show that dHDAC6 has a significant inhibitory effect on the incidence of Parkinson's disease, suggesting a protective role of the inclusive bodies and that the oligomers may be the cause of the disease. These discoveries provide a new potential target in the prevention and treatment of human Parkinson's disease. This work will be published in the July 1, 2010 issue of Molecular Biology of the Cell as the journal’s the paper of the year 2010. The US Cell Biology Association’s website InCytes will have a special report on their findings. Professor Wang and Professor Jiao are also invited by Professor Frantisek Baluska, chief editor of the Communicative and Integrative Biology to write review for the journal.