Back

Reduced tubulin polyglutamylation perturbs neuronal function and causes late-onset neurodegeneration

Chakraborty, S.; Poggini, S.; Albanese, N. C.; Ruskova, M.; Lavenir, I.; Boido, D.; Karhanova, A.; Besse, L.; Al-Inaya, Y.; Lebrun, L.; Henriot, V.; Lansky, Z.; Goedert, M.; Ciobanu, L.; Balastik, M.; Branchi, I.; Janke, C.; Magiera, M. M.

2026-08-05 neuroscience
10.64898/2026.07.31.742027 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Microtubules are essential for neuronal functions and are involved in many neurodegenerative disorders. A posttranslational modification (PTM) of neuronal microtubules, polyglutamylation, was shown to control cargo transport and induce early-onset neurodegeneration when excessively accumulated. To determine the physiological importance of this PTM, we characterised mouse models with reduced polyglutamylation. We demonstrate that these mice develop late-onset atrophy of the olfactory bulb and frontal cortex, progressively reduced dendritic spine density, and deficits in olfaction, memory, and learning. This indicates an important role of polyglutamylation in neuronal function. To test whether the observed late-onset neurodegeneration is linked to Tau pathology, we combined mice with reduced polyglutamylation with the transgenic TauP301S model for tauopathy. Strikingly, reduced polyglutamylation accelerated the most characteristic phenotype in the tauopathic mice - their premature demise. Our work reveals key roles of microtubule polyglutamylation in neuronal function with implications in late-onset neurodegeneration linked to Tau pathology.

Matching journals

The top 7 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.