Stress granules: friend or foe in neurodegenerative disorders?

Neurodegenerative diseases,such as Alzheimer’s disease,Parkinson’s disease,and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis,despite the diversity in clinical symptoms,share a striking feature at the cellular level:the accumulation of insoluble aggregates of misfolded proteins that are sequestered in intraneuronal inclusion bodies.Besides mutations in disease-associated proteins that render them aggregation-prone,the decline of protein homeostasis(i.e.proteostasis)with aging is also believed to be a contributing factor to the accumulation of protein aggregates.