Caption: Jeffrey Johnson, professor of pharmaceutical sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has developed a method to completely shield mice in a laboratory model from a toxic chemical that would otherwise cause Parkinson's disease. In the top two images, the pale color of normal mouse brains injected with the toxic MPTP reveals severe loss of nerve cells connecting to the substantia nigra, a major symptom of Parkinson's disease. In the bottom images, the brains of mice producing higher levels of the protein Nrf-2 were completely unharmed by MPTP.
Photo: courtesy Jeffrey Johnson
Date: January 2009
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