Steps towards a mouse model of Alzheimer's disease

Alzheimer's disease, a form of senile dementia, is characterised by two kinds of pathological deposits in the brain, called plaques and tangles. The molecular nature of the deposits has been identified but there is as yet little understanding of the underlying biochemistry and cell biology that lead to their formation. Progress in this area would be greatly aided by a realistic animal model. Two recent papers describe the production of transgenic mice that develop significant aspects of the Alzheimer-like pathology. The mice produced by Games et al.(1) develop plaques while those produced by Götz et al.(2) display the early stages of tangle pathology.