Newly discovered gene linked to neurodegeneration

A gene that mediates the scale of the hippocampus in both preclinical and human brains is closely associated with the pathology of a group of neurodegenerative diseases, the University of Manchester announced yesterday.

David Ashbrook, a PhD candidate from the Hager Lab at the University of Manchester, U.K., and colleagues from multiple centers in the U.K. and the U.S. leveraged two gargantuan collections of genetic data—genetic data from more than 10,000 brains in The Mouse Brain Library and brain scans from 25,000 subjects in the ENIGMA Consortium.

"The key advantage of working this way is that it is much easier to identify a genetic variant in mice as they live in such controlled environments,” said Ashbrook in the press release. “By taking the information from mice and comparing it to human gene information we can identify the same variant much more quickly."

After plumbing the depths of the data, Ashbrook et al found MGST3, a gene that controls the growth of hippocampus in both humans and mice. MGST3 happens to be linked not only to neurodegeneration, but diseases like Alzheimer’s. The research was recently published in BMC Genomics.

"Ultimately this could provide another biomarker in the toolkit for identifying those at greatest risk of developing diseases such as Alzheimer's," said Ashbrook.