Highly read on www.cell.com in October

Tangles of the tau protein are found in the brains of people who have died with Alzheimer's disease, but establishing techniques to see the protein in living people has been difficult.

Credit: ELSEVIER

A team led by Makoto Higuchi at the National Institute of Radiological Sciences in Chiba, Japan, developed a class of radioactive molecule that can be used to image live brains.

The researchers first confirmed that the molecules bound to tau using brain slices from patients with Alzheimer's disease and in mutant mice with tau deposits in their brains. The team then injected the imaging molecules into human participants. In three people with probable disease, imaging using positron emission tomography showed the molecules binding in brain areas (pictured; increasing intensity, green to red) associated with the progression of Alzheimer's; only minimal binding was observed in three healthy individuals.

Neuron 79, 1094–1108 (2013)