biorxiv2026-07-29score 86
Ringer loss weakens fruit-fly Complex I, raises superoxide, and matches a Complex I deficit in Parkinson disease brain
Tillmon and colleagues place Ringer, the Drosophila homolog of human tubulin polymerization promoting protein (TPPP), in the mitochondrial matrix and show that losing it lowers Complex I subunits, assembly factors, and enzymatic activity. The oxygen species they measure is superoxide. Complex I moves electrons from NADH through FMN into a chain of iron-sulfur clusters and out to ubiquinone at cluster N2, but this abstract never names which cluster or which core oxidation level failed. The Parkinson link is real as a claim and thin as a dataset: they say postmortem human brain shows similar deficits, without listing the human subunits.
