In Huntington’s disease, a faulty protein aggregates in brain cells and eventually kills them. Such protein aggregates could, in principle, be prevented with a heat shock protein. However, it is not well known how these proteins interact with the Huntington’s disease protein. New research by Patrick van der Wel (University of Groningen, the Netherlands) and colleagues at the University of Texas has partially resolved the structure of heat shock proteins that bind to such aggregating proteins, helping us to understand how they work. The results were published on 11 February in the journal Nature Communications.