After years of setbacks, Alzheimer's researchers are sounding optimistic again. The reason: a brain protein called tau. At this year's Society for Neuroscience meeting in Washington, D.C., there are more than 100 papers on tau, which is responsible for the tangles that form in the brains of people with Alzheimer's. In the past, tau has received less attention than another protein called amyloid beta, which causes the sticky plaques associated with Alzheimer's."Many people focused on amyloid beta for many years," says Julia Gerson, a graduate student in neuroscience at UTMB, who presented a paper on tau at the neuroscience meeting. "Now it's coming out that tau might be more important.” This toxic tau, known as a tau oligomer, occurs not only in Alzheimer's patients but also in people with traumatic brain injury. In both groups, Gerson says, the protein appears to build up over time and lead to memory problems. To find out more about this process, Gerson and a team of scientists injected tau oligomers from people with Alzheimer's into the brains of healthy mice. Within a week the mice developed memory problems; tissue samples showed toxic tau throughout the animals' brains. "What we believe is happening is that the toxic form [of tau] induces the healthy form in the brains of these mice to take on that toxic conformation," Gerson says. The news also appears in Texas Public Radio, Healthy Advices, WAMC-Northeast Public Radio, North Country Public Radio, Health News Florida, Flipboard-Modern Medicine and WCVE-Richmond PBS.