More than 24 million people worldwide suffer from neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's or Huntington's. The molecular causes of these diseases have so far been little investigated. A team of scientists from Leipzig University and the Technical University of Dresden, as well as the Kurt Schwabe Institute Meinsberg, is now looking into these molecular mechanisms with new approaches, and has developed a technique involving a thermal molecule trap. The researchers have published their findings in Nature Methods.