ANU researchers have made a major discovery that could help treat diseases that cause seizures, including epilepsy.

When examining the “force-sensing” protein, which is responsible for physical touch and brain development, researchers found that diseases such as hypomyelination could be better treated.

“By knowing more about how the force-sensing protein works, it opens the door to try to develop therapeutic opportunities to help people with these conditions,” says ANU professor Ben Corry.

“In diseases such as hypomyelination, the body cannot produce myelin – the substance insulating the nervous system’s electrical wires – at normal levels.”

Prof Corry says the way that protein molecules sense a change in the cell membrane to open up a pore was behaving differently from similar proteins.

“In this case, it was half formed by the protein and half by the cell membrane itself. This is something unheard of for us biologists,” he says.

“We’ve shown that these proteins work in a completely different way from other sensing proteins. This is important because they could be playing some quite unexpected roles that are yet to be determined.”

While the researchers were studying healthy cells, they said the next step would be to look at what’s happening on the cellular level to people with diseases with poor myelination of neurons.

The research is supported by the Australian Research Council (ARC) and has been published in Nature.