Sought FUS, Found TAF—A New Fibril in Frontotemporal Dementia

While filaments of either tau or TDP-43 underlie 90% of frontotemporal dementia cases, the proteopathic culprits behind the remaining 10 percent have eluded researchers. Fused in sarcoma (FUS) often forms inclusions in such cases, hence Benjamin Ryskeldi-Falcon’s group and collaborators expected to find FUS fibrils when they put samples from these patients’ brains through the cryoEM ringer. As reported in Nature, they happened upon filaments of another RNA-binding protein, namely TAF15. More…