Shared from parkinsonsnewstoday.com.
Most molecular features in the human brain differ between samples obtained from living individuals and those collected after death, according to new findings from the Living Brain Project, a multiscale investigation from The Friedman Brain Institute in New York.
This study, led by researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in collaboration with Bpgbio, a clinical stage biopharma, shows that 95% of RNA molecules and 61% of proteins are significantly different in living and postmortem samples.
These findings challenge the longstanding view that postmortem brain samples serve as an accurate representation of the living brain, and can be used to study the molecular mechanisms —including genes, proteins, chemicals, and cell types — of neurodegenerative conditions such as Parkinson’s disease.