Diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease might be readily confirmed with a simple skin biopsy if US-led research comes to fruition.

Researchers have adapted two assays used to detect prion protein in Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease (CJD) to enable them to detect pathological alpha-synuclein, a protein found in Lewy bodies in the brain in Parkinson’s disease, using a skin punch biopsy.

The work builds on recent evidence that suggests misfolded alpha-synuclein, both in the brains of people with Parkinson’s disease and in vitro, might act as a ‘seed’, causing normal alpha-synuclein that it encounters to misfold and aggregate into clumps, much as prion proteins spread their pathology in CJD, the authors say.

Both assays — real time quaking-induced conversion (RT-QuIC) and protein misfolding cyclic amplification (PMCA) — test the ability of the rogue alpha-synuclein protein to seed the conversion of normal alpha-synuclein into a misfolded aggregate.