Congratulations to Yun Fan, Qinyue Zhao and Wencheng Xia for publishing their work in Cell Research!

Abstract: In summary, we report that in our attempt to purify α-syn fibrils from the postmortem brain of a patient with PDD, we obtained fibrils formed by TMEM106B instead. Intriguingly, using the same protocol, we also obtained TMEM106B fibrils from two normal elders (71 yr and 101 yr). Moreover, cryo-EM structure determination of these ex vivo fibrils showed that they share similar structures, in which TMEM106B adopts a curling stone-like fold composed of residues 120–254 that originally form the luminal domain of TMEM106B in its native fold. Our work demonstrates that TMEM106B commonly forms amyloid fibrils in diseased and aged brains with no necessary consequence of NDs, which highlights the complicated relationship between protein amyloid formation and the pathogenesis of NDs.

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