Constitutive secretion of tau protein by an unconventional mechanism

The microtubule-associated protein tau plays a critical role in the pathogenesis of Alzheimer's disease and several related disorders. In the disease tau aggregates into paired helical and straight filaments, which can form higher order neurofibrillary tangles in neurons and this pathology is associated with progressive neuronal loss and cognitive decline. Tau is a cytoplasmic protein and is thought to be released only from degenerating cells. In contrast, here we provide evidence that tau is constitutively secreted at a low level. We directly show tau release in cell culture model systems. In inducible transfected cell lines we observe that a small proportion of full-length tau is released from intact cells in a time dependent manner. We show that this tau is released by an unconventional secretion process, as the release is temperature dependent but not blocked by inhibitors of the conventional secretory pathway. We characterize the released tau as full length, not vesicle associated and containing Phospho-Tau (181P) proportional to its intracellular concentration. We demonstrate that tau secretion and its suppression by low temperature also occurs in human neurons differentiated from induced pluripotent stem cells. The constitutive tau secretion that we propose provides the most parsimonious explanation for the observed presence of tau in the CSF of healthy animals and human beings. If previously postulated pathogenic extracellular tau intermediates are released by this route, low level constitutive tau secretion could play a role in the spread of tau pathology in Alzheimer's disease and other human tauopathies.