Neurofibrillary tangles in progressive supranuclear palsy brains exhibit immunoreactivity to frameshift mutant ubiquitin-B protein

Abstract

In Alzheimer's disease (AD) neurofibrillary tangles (NFT) are strongly tau and ubiquitin immunopositive, and contain an aberrant form of ubiquitin derived from the ubiquitin-B gene denoted as UBB+1. We explored whether the tau-related NFT seen in another neurodegenerative disease, progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP), also showed an accumulation of UBB+1. Three cases of PSP were examined immunohistochemically for tau protein, ubiquitin-protein conjugates and UBB+1 using single and double labelling. We conclude that UBB+1 is associated with compact globose tangles rather than dispersed accumulations of tau in PSP, showing that its presence is not unique to AD. We propose that aggregation of ubiquitinated proteins into compact inclusions in PSP might be due to inhibition of the degradation of multiubiquitinated proteins by ubiquitin chains containing proximal UBB+1 rather than normal ubiquitin.