NNI Unveils Fly Model for Studying Parkinson’s Disease

Researchers at the National Neuroscience Institute (NNI) in Singapore have developed a fly model of Parkinson’s disease (PD) that can speed up drug discovery efforts for the debilitating disorder. The exact cause of the disease remains unknown, although a significant number of PD patients harbor a mutation in a gene known as “LRRK2”.

NNI has previously contributed to the discovery of another LRRK2 variant that is almost exclusive to the Chinese and Japanese populations. An individual with this “Asian” gene variant has a two to three times higher risk of developing PD. The organization has now brought this clinical data to the laboratory. It has created the first fruit fly model of this variant and showed that with aging, populations of brain cells that are similar to those affected in human PD, start to die gradually in the fly’s brain.

Associated with this, older mutant flies also exhibit difficulty in their movements. These features displayed by the fly PD model bear a resemblance to the human condition. Studying the novel model could potentially help unlock some mysteries that surround brain cell death in PD patients.