Are Neurons Just Too Laissez-Faire about Repair?
Here’s a Provocative Idea for the Alzheimer’s Field to (Dis)Prove: Neurons Choke on Cell Cycle after Years of Letting Their DNA Fall into Disrepair Philip Hanawalt of Stanford University has built a distinguished career studying the mechanisms of DNA repair, the medical relevance of which until recently was recognized mainly in cancer and related disorders such as Xeroderma pigmentosum and Cockayne syndrome. In recent years, however, Hanawalt and his research associate Thierry Nouspikel have turned their attention to DNA repair in differentiated neurons. This February, they proposed that postmitotic neurons may be setting themselves up for disaster by allowing DNA damage to accumulate unchecked in large swaths of their genome during a person’s adult life. Melding the emerging literature on cell-cycle reentry in AD with their own recent work on DNA repair, Nouspikel and Hanawalt write that such neurons would be unable to pull off an orderly round of DNA replication. Indeed, fatal proble
