A new study from researchers at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) has found a molecular link between Parkinson's disease and melanoma.
"Several studies have shown that melanoma occurs two to six times more frequently in the Parkinson's population than the healthy population," says Dexter Dean, Ph.D., who presented the work today at the American Chemical Society meeting. "What's more, the protein involved in Parkinson's disease, α-synuclein, is elevated in melanoma cells."
"Most people know that amyloids are involved in diseases, such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, but it's less well-known that some amyloids, like Pmel, actually serve a useful function," Jennifer Lee, Dean's postdoctoral advisor at NHLBI, explains. In healthy melanocytes, Pmel forms amyloid fibrils that act as scaffolds to store melanin in melanosomes. "Because both α-synuclein and Pmel are expressed in melanoma cells, we wondered if these two amyloid proteins could interact, and whether this interaction could be relevant to the correlation between Parkinson's disease and melanoma," Lee adds.
To investigate whether α-synuclein and Pmel could interact, the researchers used microscopy and western blotting to show that the two proteins both resided in the melanosomes of human melanoma cells. When Dean added preformed α-synuclein amyloid to a test tube containing the amyloid-forming region of Pmel, the α-synuclein fibrils stimulated Pmel to aggregate and form a twisted fibril structure that the protein does not normally adopt on its own.
Because α-synuclein in melanoma cells may also be found in its soluble, or non-amyloid, form, the researchers performed other in vitro experiments in which they added soluble α-synuclein to the Pmel RPT domain. In this case, α-synuclein inhibited Pmel's ability to self-aggregate and form amyloid in a concentration-dependent manner. They traced this activity to the first 60 amino acids of α-synuclein.
"We now have preliminary data that suggest an amyloid from one protein can 'seed' or template amyloid from another, and in the soluble form, α-synuclein prevents Pmel aggregation." Lee says. "Therefore, we think that both forms of α-synuclein could diminish melanin biosynthesis—the amyloid form by causing Pmel to form an unusual twisted structure, and the soluble form by stopping Pmel from aggregating like it should." Loss of skin pigmentation could contribute to the increased melanoma risk in Parkinson's disease patients, the researchers say.
"I think we're just at the tip of the iceberg of appreciating what α-synuclein might be doing in melanoma," Dean says. "In future experiments, I'm really interested in understanding more about what α-synuclein is doing to promote melanoma proliferation, in addition to this interaction with Pmel."