ArticleNature neuroscience2026
Phosphorylated tau exhibits antimicrobial activity capable of neutralizing herpes simplex virus 1 infectivity in human neurons.
Article in Nature neuroscience, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed.
- Herpes simplex virus and kallikrein-related peptidases - a functional connection in Alzheimer's disease.Alzheimer's research & therapy · 2026Article
- Rethinking Alzheimer's Origins: Antimicrobial Amyloid and Tau Point to Potential Upstream Immune Triggers.Neuroscience bulletin · 2026Article
- Chemokines in Alzheimer's Disease: Early Defence, Late Damage and the Impact of Sex and Infection.Basic & clinical pharmacology & toxicology · 2026Review
- Lung endothelial cytopathic tau is sufficient to impair long-term potentiation during infection.American journal of respiratory cell and molecular biology · 2026Article
- High reelin expression may explain why a subgroup of entorhinal cortex neurons functions as an initial nucleation site of Alzheimer's disease.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Article
- MipSScs: Artificial neural network-based data integration of 2D/3D single-cell spatial RNA sequence data from virus-infected human cerebral organoids.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Convergence of neuroinflammation across major neurotropic viral exposomes in AD and ADRD.Journal of neuroinflammation · 2026Review
- Resolving human neuronal herpesvirus reactivation via petabase-scale association studies.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Can we refute a role for infections in Alzheimer's disease pathogenesis?Alzheimer's & dementia : the journal of the Alzheimer's Association · 2026Article
- A high-throughput, quantitative platform using 2D dissociated human cerebral organoids to model neuroinflammation in Alzheimer's disease.NPJ dementia · 2026Article
- Herpes simplex virus infection and Alzheimer's disease.Frontiers in aging neuroscience · 2026Review
- From infection to dysfunction: viral triggers and antiviral immune factors in Alzheimer's disease pathology.Frontiers in immunology · 2026Review
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Authors and funding
11 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Tau is a microtubule-associated cytoskeletal protein, which, when hyperphosphorylated and aggregated, can result in a myriad of different tauopathies, including Alzheimer's disease (AD). We previously showed that the principal component of senile plaques, amyloid beta (Aβ), is an antimicrobial peptide capable of binding and entrapping microbial pathogens. Here we show that tau is hyperphosphorylated in neurons in response to viral infection and can neutralize herpes simplex virus 1 (HSV-1) infectivity by directly binding to viral capsids. Our data suggest that the 'pathogenic' characteristics of tau hyperphosphorylation, microtubule destabilization and aggregation are part of an antiviral response, in which tau serves as a host defense protein in the innate immune system of the brain. The combined antimicrobial activities of Aβ and phosphorylated tau resulting in Aβ plaques and neurofibrillary tangles, along with neuroinflammation, suggest that AD neuropathology may have evolved as an orchestrated innate immune host defense response to microbial infection in the brain.
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