By Wiida Fourie-Basson
Source Nature
For the past 13 years, Ben Loos, a physiologist from Stellenbosch University in South Africa, has been trying to understand the role of autophagy in dementia. From the Greek word for ‘self-eating,’ autophagy is a process in which worn out, toxic or degraded cellular components are swept up and recycled.
What if we could understand whether an individual cell was in distress? Would identifying cell distress provide an early warning sign for the onset of neurodegenerative diseases?