Tau filaments from the Alzheimer’s brain revealed

Tau filaments isolated from an Alzheimer’s brain are the latest, high-profile exploit of cryo-electron microscopy. Crafting a technique that has become his claim to fame, Sjors Scheres of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England, teamed up with Michel Goedert, also at MRC, to solve 3.4-Angstrom resolution structures of both straight and paired helical filaments of tau. The structures, first unveiled at the AD/PD meeting in Vienna last March, were formally published in Nature on July 5. More…