Interaction of mitochondria and lysosomes key in Parkinson's disease

The Scientific committee would like to share this excellent article written by Soojin Kim and al. on Interaction of mitochondria and lysosomes key in Parkinson's disease.

 Credit: Northwestern University

The Scope is: Mitochondria-lysosome contacts are recently identified sites for mediating crosstalk between both organelles, but their role in normal and diseased human neurons remains unknown. In this study, we demonstrate that mitochondria-lysosome contacts can dynamically form in the soma, axons, and dendrites of human neurons, allowing for their bidirectional crosstalk.

The demonstaration is: That M–L contact sites dynamically form in human neurons, and further investigates their role in neurons from patients with GBA1-linked PD. We found that loss of lysosomal GCase enzymatic activity in PD patient-derived dopaminergic neurons led to prolonged M–L contact tethering dynamics due to defective contact untethering machinery, and resulted in misregulated axonal distribution of mitochondria and decreased ATP levels.

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-22113-3