Seeing the invisible: mapping protein aggregates in Parkinson’s disease

This video summarises the paper “Large-scale visualization of α-synuclein oligomers in Parkinson’s disease brain tissue”, published in Nature Biomedical Engineering (2025). For decades, scientists have known that Parkinson’s disease involves α-synuclein clumps called Lewy bodies, but what happens before they form has remained almost impossible to see. This study, from the University of Cambridge, UCL, and the Francis Crick Institute, introduces a new imaging approach capable of revealing structures that were previously beyond optical reach, using post-mortem human brain samples. The work provides direct visual evidence of nanoscale protein assemblies and explores how their abundance and spatial distribution differ between healthy and Parkinson’s brains. The implications reach far beyond diagnosis, hinting at processes that may begin long before clinical symptoms appear.