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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A structure for SorLA/LR11

The importance of the SorLA or LR11 receptor in braking Alzheimer’s was originally defined here at Emory by Jim Lah and Allan Levey’s labs. Japanese researchers recently determined the structure of SorLA and published the results in Nature Structural and Molecular Biology. Their findings point toward a direct role for SorLA in binding toxic circulating beta-amyloid and transporting it to the lysosome for degradation. Hat tip to Alzforum.

Posted on February 17, 2015 by Quinn Eastman in Neuro Leave a comment

Beyond the usual suspects among Alzheimer’s proteins

If you’ve been paying attention to Alzheimer’s disease research, you’ve probably read a lot about beta-amyloid. It’s a toxic protein fragment that dominates the plaques that appear in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s. Many experimental therapies for Alzheimer’s target beta-amyloid, but so far, they’ve not proven effective.

That could be for several reasons. Maybe those treatments started too late to make a difference. But an increasing number of Alzheimer’s researchers are starting to reconsider the field’s emphasis on amyloid. Nature News has a feature this week explaining how the spotlight is shifting to the protein ApoE, encoded by the gene whose variation is responsible for the top genetic risk factor for Alzheimer’s.

In line with this trend, Emory’s Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center recently received a five-year, $7.2 million grant to go beyond the usual suspects like beta-amyloid. Emory will lead several universities in a project to comprehensively examine proteins altered in Alzheimer’s. You’ve heard of the Cancer Genome Atlas? Think of this as the Alzheimer’s Proteome Atlas, potentially addressing the same kind of questions about which changes are the drivers and which are the passengers.

Emory’s back-to-basics proteomics approach has already yielded some scientific fruit, uncovering changes in proteins involved in RNA splicing and processing. Also, the Nature feature also has some background on a clinical trial called TOMMORROW, which Emory’s ADRC is participating in.

Posted on June 4, 2014 by Quinn Eastman in Neuro Leave a comment