PANTHOS

PANTHOS (from the Greek for "poisonous flower") is the terminal morphology of autophagic–lysosomal collapse: a neuron so swollen with expanded, de-acidified autolysosomes that its cargo arranges into flower-like rosettes around the cell. Named by Nixon and colleagues, it is the visible endpoint of the neuron's clearance failure — and, on the corpus's Inside Out Plaque reading, the mechanism by which a plaque is born. When the PANTHOS neuron ruptures, it spills its undigested amyloid cargo into the neuropil, so the extracellular deposit is the gravestone of the dead cell rather than the poison that killed it.

PANTHOS is where the Endosomal Nexus, Autophagic Collapse and Neuronal lysis forming extracellular plaques meet in a single image. It is the molecular twin, a century on, of the drusige Nekrose — the "glandular necrosis" radiating from a centre — that Oskar Fischer drew in 1907.

Converges on

Inside Out Plaque · Endosomal Nexus · Autophagic Collapse · Neuronal lysis forming extracellular plaques · Plaque Origin What is Established

Note on provenance. The "PANTHOS neurons are the principal source of senile plaques" finding (Lee, Nixon et al. 2022) is quantified in APP transgenic mouse models; PANTHOS is observed in human AD brain but its fractional contribution to human plaque burden is unquantified. See Plaque Origin What is Established.

Studied by

Ralph Nixon · David Rubinsztein