Welcome to my research journey of Alzheimer's disease
Neuroscience: Alzheimer's disease at State Key Laboratory of Biochemical Engineering Chinese Academy of Sciences (Beijing) (X-lab)
I learned the basic facts and data about Alzheimer's disease. I gained a more professional and comprehensive biomedical knowledge
Construction of AD/PD transgenic mice
Acquisition and determination of neural stem cells
I also learned the basic disease mechanism
Some of the experiments...
Most of them are behavioral experiments between normal lab mice and modified mice with AD
Recognition of new things
Ability to suspend
Pole climbing
There are also other experiments like Y-maze and lab rice anatomy. I also learned how to prepare and observe the brain tissue slices.
This was my enlightening research experiment that opened my eyes to see the laboratory research and pathogenesis.
Me writing some notes.
CIS Research program: Molecular Biology - Memory and Memorial disease at molecular level
This is a 5-week online research program that involves lectures and independent research. The lectures cover a very large range of knowledge.
At the beginning, the class was introduced to the fundamental knowledge of Proteinopathy, which is the core of neurodegenerative diseases.
The molecular mechanism of the disease is protein misfolding and aggregation.
The pathology of AD can be discussed from two aspects:
1)Amyloid plaques (extracellular)
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Composed of Aβ, a small fragment of amyloid precursor protein (APP) cut by beta secretase and gamma secretase
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Form Aβ oligomer aggregates
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Cause cell death by mis-regulating signaling and creating ion channels
2)Neurofibrillary tangles (intracellular)
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Composed of an abnormal form of protein Tau
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Tau normally stabilize cytoskeleton and decrease their dynamic
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Cytoskeleton maintain cell morphology and convey intracellular transport
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R3:R4 1:1 in normal people; R3:R4 1:3 in AD patients
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Can be transfer via synapses
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Two pathological pathway for neuron death:
1. AD + Aβ, amyloid plaques + Tau dysfunction
2. Tau dysfunction via hyper-phosphorylation/fragmentation + neurofibrillary tangles
Current available treatments:
Treat symptom but not cause:
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acetylcholinesterase inhibitors
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Memantine
Aβ vaccine:
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Donanemab – Eli Lilly
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Lecanemab – Easai and Biogen
Formation of amyloid plague and neurofibrillary tangle
The above information gives an overview of the pathology of Alzheimer's disease. In the following few weeks, we learned about many other topics like endoplasmic reticulum stress and quality control, autophagy-lysosomal machinery, viruses linked to neurodegenerative diseases, receptor trafficking, horseradish peroxidase retrograde tracing and so on.
In this research project, I learned more research skills and gained more experience in researching various aspects of neurodegenerative diseases. Among all the sub-topics, I was interested in the virus hypothesis, because I always had a passion with Epidemiology. To be more specific, it is about how Herpes Simplex Virus associate with onset of Alzheimer's disease.
Click here to view my research paper on Herpes Simplex Virus type 1 and AD
Volunteer
We were so lucky to be accompanied by the rainbow when we took the picture
Photo taken during the chanting event with the AD caregivers in Tibet.