More evidence that schizophrenia is a protein aggregation disorder?

 

Whether or not schizophrenia is a protein aggregation/protein folding/protein insolubility disease is a controversial topic right now. I'm on the controversial side because I think that it is one largely because proteins from the post-mortem brains of patients with the disease are no fun at all to work with. A previous MS student who shall not be named here killed a pile of EasySpray columns a few years ago because he didn't take this problem as seriously as I suggested that he should. 

Here is another study on the protein aggregation side - though it should be noted that these authors are the source of the brains that I've worked with in the past as well. 

However - this is the cool thing about this study - they demonstrate the use of a material for clinical diagnostics that I think is really really cool. 

Postmortem brains have the unfortunate side effect of...being postmortem.... what they do here is extract olfactory neurons from the noses(?) of people and grow them out on a dish and then study those! 

While....that honestly sounds like no fun at all (they cut or take a biopsy from the inside of your nose? ouch) ...I sure would prefer to do that if those neurons could provide insight into how the health of neurons inside my skull. I'd rather do minimally invasive than EXTREMELY INVASIVE. 

And from this molecular analysis it looks like they see the same protein aggregation phenotypes in the olfactory neurons. Might be worth thinking about for sure....