Parkinson's disease (PD) is a common neurodegenerative condition characterised by the presence in the brain of large intraneuronal aggregates, known as Lewy bodies and Lewy neurites, containing fibrillar α-synuclein. According to the amyloid hypothesis, these large end-stage species form from smaller soluble protein assemblies, often termed oligomers, which are proposed as early drivers of pathogenesis. To date, however, this hypothesis has remained controversial, at least in part because it has not been possible to directly visualise oligomeric aggregates in human brain tissue. Therefore, their presence, abundance and distributions have remained elusive. Here, we present ASA-PD (Advanced Sensing of Aggregates - Parkinson's Disease), an imaging method to generate large-scale α-synuclein oligomer maps in post-mortem human brain tissue. We combined autofluorescence suppression with single-molecule fluorescence methods, which together, enable the detection of nanoscale α-synuclein aggregates. To demonstrate the utility of this platform, we captured ~1.2 million oligomers from the anterior cingulate cortex in human post-mortem brain samples from PD and healthy control patients. Our data revealed a specific subpopulation of nanoscale oligomers that represent an early hallmark of the proteinopathy that underlies PD. We anticipate that quantitative information about oligomer distributions provided by ASA-PD will enable mechanistic studies to reveal the pathological processes caused by α-synuclein aggregation.

Large-scale visualisation of α-synuclein oligomers in Parkinson's disease brain tissue