Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) is a progressive neurodegenerative disease caused by the deterioration and eventual death of motor neurons. These cells carry signals from the brain to muscles and facilitate all forms of movement. Understanding how motor neurons die in ALS is important so new treatments can be devised that halt, or potentially reverse the disease. Inside a cell, genes work together to allow the cell to function normally. To understand how these motor neurons die, we investigated how genes from motor neurons work then compared genes of motor neurons from healthy vs ALS individuals. We identified a number of candidate genes which may be contributing towards motor neuron death in ALS. This gave us a greater understanding of how ALS develops.

You can read the full publication at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8693652/.