The intra- and extracellular accumulation of misfolded and aggregated amyloid proteins is a common feature in several neurodegenerative diseases, which is thought to play a major role in disease severity and progression. The principal machineries maintaining proteostasis are the ubiquitin proteasomal and lysosomal autophagy systems, where heat shock proteins play a crucial role. Many protein aggregates are degraded by the lysosomes, depending on aggregate size, peptide sequence, and degree of misfolding, while others are selectively tagged for removal by heat shock proteins and degraded by either the proteasome or phagosomes. These systems are compromised in different neurodegenerative diseases. Therefore, developing novel targets and classes of therapeutic drugs, which can reduce aggregates and maintain proteostasis in the brains of neurodegenerative models, is vital. Natural products that can modulate heat shock proteins/proteosomal pathway are considered promising for treating neurodegenerative diseases. Here we discuss the current knowledge on the role of HSPs in protein misfolding diseases and knowledge gained from animal models of Alzheimer’s disease, tauopathies, and Huntington’s diseases. Further, we discuss the emerging treatment regimens for these diseases using natural products, like curcumin, which can augment expression or function of heat shock proteins in the cell.

Aggregation of misfolded amyloid proteins is a key factor for synaptic damage and impairment of neuronal communication in several neurodegenerative diseases. Since last few decayed several synthesized compounds, small molecules, drugs have been used to target against these misfolded proteins, but ultimately failed to prevent the misfolded protein aggregations and neurotoxicity effectively. Therefore, therapies for these diseases are elusive and under active investigation. As a potent anti-amyloid activity and its Pleotropic actions, recently curcumin has been used for treatment of several neurodegenerative diseases. It is the main ingredients of turmeric powder of the herb Curcuma longa. Its preferential binding properties with misfolded amyloid proteins attracted researchers to use as a potential therapy to prevent neurodegeneration. Importantly, curcumin is also a safe, inexpensive, easily available Polyphenol and it can cross blood brain barrier. Therefore, it is considered one of the promising natural Polyphenol for therapy of age related protein misfolding diseases, including several neurodegenerative disorders. In this mini review article we provided conceptual information about the multiple potentials of curcumin for prevention and/or treatment of neurodegenerative diseases.

Optic ataxia is a neurological condition that shows clinical manifestations of disturbances in visual guided hand movements on reaching for a target object. Previous studies failed to provide substantial evidences for the neural structural pathway damaged by this condition. Therefore, this study was aimed to identify the neural structural connectivity between “Visual cortex with Superior Parietal Lobule” and to correlate its functional importance, using “Diffusion Imaging fiber Tractography. The fibers were traced, and we confirmed its extension from “Visual cortex (Brodmann’s Areas 18 and 19) to Superior Parietal Lobule (Brodmann’s Area 7)”. This new observation gives an insight to understand the structural existence and functional correlations between “Visual cortex with Superior Parietal Lobule” which is involved in targeting the grasping hand movements towards a visually perceived object, called visuo-motor coordination pathway or “how” stream pathways in visual perception. The observational analysis used thirty-two healthy adults, ultra-high b-value, diffusion MRI datasets from an Open access research platform. The datasets range between 20–49 years, in both sexes, with mean age of 31.1 years. The confirmatory observational analysis process includes, datasets acquisition, pre-processing, processing, reconstruction, fiber tractography and analysis using software tools. All the datasets confirmed that the fiber structural extension between, Visual cortex to superior parietal lobe in both the sexes may be responsible for the visual spatial recognition of objects. These new fiber connectivity evidences justify the structural relevance of visual spatial recognition impairments, such as optic ataxia.