Warren symposium follows legacy of geneticist giant

If we want to understand how the brain creates memories, and how genetic disorders distort the brain’s machinery, then the fragile X gene is an ideal place to start. That’s why the Stephen T. Warren Memorial Symposium, taking place November 28-29 at Emory, will be a significant event for those interested in neuroscience and genetics. Stephen T. Warren, 1953-2021 Warren, the founding chair of Emory’s Department of Human Genetics, led an international team that discovered Read more

Mutations in V-ATPase proton pump implicated in epilepsy syndrome

Why and how disrupting V-ATPase function leads to epilepsy, researchers are just starting to figure Read more

Tracing the start of COVID-19 in GA

At a time when COVID-19 appears to be receding in much of Georgia, it’s worth revisiting the start of the pandemic in early 2020. Emory virologist Anne Piantadosi and colleagues have a paper in Viral Evolution on the earliest SARS-CoV-2 genetic sequences detected in Georgia. Analyzing relationships between those virus sequences and samples from other states and countries can give us an idea about where the first COVID-19 infections in Georgia came from. We can draw Read more
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kinase

Tangled up with tau

Pathologist Keqiang Ye and his colleagues have identified a new potential drug target in Alzheimer’s disease. It’s called SRPK2 (serine-arginine protein kinase 2).

Keqiang Ye, PhD

Depleting this enzyme from the brain using genetic engineering tools alleviates cognitive impairment in an animal model of Alzheimer’s. The result suggests that drugs Cheap Oakleys that target this enzyme could be valuable in the treatment of Alzheimer’s, although additional studies on human brain samples are necessary to fully confirm the findings, Ye says.

The results were published Tuesday in Journal of Neuroscience. The first author is postdoctoral fellow Yi Hong.

Hong and colleagues found that SRPK2 has elevated activity in a mouse model of Alzheimer’s. It acts on tau, one of the two major toxic clumpy proteins in Alzheimer’s. (beta-amyloid is outside the cell and forms plaques, tau is inside and forms tangles). Previous research on SRPK2 indicated that it had something to do with RNA splicing, so its “entanglement” with tau is a surprise.

Posted on November 29, 2012 by Quinn Eastman in Neuro Leave a comment