Eye is the Window to the Brain Pathology

Endoplasmic Reticulum-Mitochondrial Cross-Talk in Neurodegenerative and Eye Diseases

Neurodegenerative diseases demonstrate the progressive decline of brain functions resulting in a significant deterioration in the quality of patient's life. With increasing life expectancy, there has been a significant increase in the incidence of these diseases. Neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis are devastating and afflicts a large world population. Eye, given the similar neural and vascular similarity to the brain, demonstrates many pathological hallmarks of some of these neurological diseases. Moreover, these diseases create an economic and social burden to society. Despite tremendous efforts made in the drug discovery, there is no cure for these fatal diseases. Thus, there is an unmet need to understand cellular and molecular pathophysiology of these diseases. All these diseases demonstrate damage to a large number of seemingly disparate cellular processes and functions such as Ca+2 homeostasis, lipid metabolism, axonal transport, unfolded protein response, autophagy and inflammatory responses. Mitochondria are closely associated with Endoplasmic reticulum (ER) and ER-mitochondrial cross-talk regulates many of these cellular processes and functions damaged in neurodegenerative and eye diseases. Several studies have implicated the disruption of ER-mitochondria contacts in these diseases. This review is aimed at understanding and summarizing the role of ER-mitochondria interacting proteins in major neurodegenerative and eye diseases studied so far.