Random lasing as a sensing tool in brain samples of an animal model of Huntington's disease

Abstract

Huntington's disease (HD) is an autosomal dominant neurodegenerative disease caused by an expansion of CAG triplet repeats in the gene that encodes the protein Huntingtin (HTT). Proteolytic fragments of the mutant HTT (mHTT) are accumulated in neurons leading to neurodegeneration. HD has no cure, and most research efforts are focused on finding disease-modifying therapies and biomarkers of disease progression and treatment efficacy. Random lasing (RL) has been successfully used in biomedicine to differentiate normal from pathological tissues showing robust morphological and structural differences. Here, we evaluate the potential of RL in discriminating brain samples of a transgenic mouse model of HD from those of its wild-type littermates. Furthermore, we also investigate the sensibility of RL to the effects of a mHTT lowering treatment in transgenic mice therapy. The results reveal that multivariate statistical analysis of RL signals discriminates between healthy and transgenic mice and also between treated and untreated transgenic mice. These findings open up perspectives for RL as a sensing tool in HD and, possibly, in other neurodegenerative diseases whose pathogenic hallmark is the accumulation of anomalous proteins.