JERUSALEM, March 5 (Xinhua) -- A multinational research team discovered a link between Parkinson's disease (PD) and the brain's extracellular matrix, according to a statement issued by Israel's University of Haifa on Tuesday.

One of the main problems in PD studies is that only about 15 percent of patients have a known genetic risk factor named GBA1, while 85 percent of patients are random cases. Therefore, it is difficult for researchers to create an animal model to study the disease.

An extracellular matrix is a support network made of proteins and sugars, helping cells with their structure and functions, like controlling cell communication and separating tissues.

In the new study, published in Nature's npj Parkinson's Disease, the researchers used a cell programming method to turn PD patients' skin cells into stem cells and then sorted them into nerve cells with the same patient's genetic load.

The participants include PD patients with the risky GBA1 variant, random PD patients and healthy people as the control group.

The researchers observed changes in the expression of genes responsible for extracellular matrix proteins among cells from all PD patients, with the genetic variant or not.

Specifically, cells created from all PD patients had lower mRNA and fewer proteins building the extracellular matrix compared to cells from healthy individuals.

Additionally, the collagen IV protein, crucial for the matrix, aggregated in all PD patients but not in healthy individuals.

The researchers said extracellular matrix could be a focus of PD research in future studies. Enditem

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