Mitochondrial imaging in live neurons from Parkinson’s disease patients.

Parkinson’s disease is the most prevalent neurodegenerative movement disorder. These patients suffer from characteristic motor problems, but can also develop a variety of non-motor problems such as constipation, psychosis, depression and dementia, all of which severely undermine quality of life. A typical characteristic of Parkinson’s disease is the loss of a specific population of nerve cells that produce dopamine in a brain region called the substantia nigra. Although the substantia nigra was long thought to be the only region affected in Parkinson’s disease, recently it became clear that also other brain regions and even nerves in the periphery for instance those innervating the stomach and intestines are drastically affected by the disease. Evidence from genetic and experimental animal studies point at mitochondria, the energy producing elements in a cell, to be in part responsible for the nerve degeneration in Parkinson’s disease. Recently our group developed a method to visualize, using advanced microscopy, human nerve activity in a small biopsy of the intestine, which can be taken during a relatively routine examination by a gastroenterologist. In this project we will use this unique technique to investigate for the first time whether mitochondria in living human neurons from Parkinson’s disease are indeed defective.