The fibres blamed in Alzheimer's have a day job: delivering genetic messages to the next generation

Amyloid fibres — the protein tangles best known from Alzheimer's disease — turn out to have an honest job. In a study published in Molecular Cell, William Mallen, working in Anthony Fitzpatrick's lab at Columbia University's Zuckerman Institute, shows that amyloid fibrils in semen bind to RNA — the cell's message molecules — protect them, and deliver them into sperm cells. Embryos fertilised with such sperm produced at least ten times more of a test protein than those exposed to the RNA without the fibres. The work recasts these fibres as a natural delivery system, part of how fathers may pass epigenetic information — instructions layered on top of DNA — to their children. It also suggests a future tool: because these fibrils are human-made proteins, they might one day shuttle therapeutic RNA into cells without provoking the immune reactions that modified viruses, gene therapy's usual couriers, can trigger.

SDG 9 · Industry, innovation and infrastructure — Mechanism: tech innovation