Cheers! Red wine may help keep Alzheimer's at bay

Washington(ANI): Here's another reason to enjoy a glass of red wine: A new research has shown that an organic compound found in the drink - resveratrol - has the ability to neutralize the toxic effects of proteins linked to Alzheimer's disease.

The findings are a step toward understanding the large-scale death of brain cells seen in certain neurodegenerative diseases.

"We've shown how resveratrol has very interesting selectivity to target and neutralize a select set of toxic peptide isoforms," Rensselaer Professor Peter M. Tessier said.

"Because resveratrol picks out the clumps of peptides that are bad and leaves alone the ones that are benign, it helps us to think about the structural differences between the peptide isoforms," he added.

Isoforms are different packing arrangements of a particular peptide. Deformations of a particular peptide - the Aß1-42 peptide - have been linked to Alzheimer's disease. Improperly folded peptides have been shown to collect in accumulations called "plaques" within the brain. Those plaques are often found near areas of cell death in diseased brains.

It is not clear that resveratrol is able to cross the blood-brain barrier, Tessier said. However, the molecule has garnered interest in recent years for its potential impact on cancer and aging.

In their research, Tessier and his co-authors generated A peptides packed together in five unique isoforms, or "arrangements" (monomer, soluble oligomer, non-toxic oligomer, fibrillar intermediates and amyloid fibrils). In their experiments, three of these arrangements were toxic to human cells, two were not.

Next, the researchers introduced resveratrol.

The resveratrol reacted with the toxic arrangements of the Aß1-42 peptide, neutralizing their toxicity. It did not affect the non-toxic arrangements.

"The surprise is that this molecule can target some of these packing arrangements that are toxic and rearrange them into packing arrangements that are not toxic. For those forms that are non-toxic, it doesn't change them," Tessier said.

Intriguingly, Tessier said, one of the toxic arrangements (the soluble oligomer) and one of the non-toxic arrangements (the non-toxic oligomer) were indistinguishable by various methods. And yet the resveratrol only affected the toxic arrangement.

The point, Tessier concluded, is that the seemingly identical non-toxic and toxic arrangements must have some distinguishing feature yet to be discovered, raising questions for future study.

The study has been published in the May 28 edition of the Journal of Biological Chemistry.