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

David Katz

Unusual partnership may drive neurodegeneration in Alzheimer’s

Emory researchers have gained insights into how toxic Tau proteins kill brain cells in Alzheimer’s disease and other neurodegenerative diseases. Tau is the main ingredient of neurofibrillary tangles, one of two major hallmarks of Alzheimer’s.

Pathological forms of Tau appear to soak up and sequester a regulatory protein called LSD1, preventing it from performing its functions in the cell nucleus. In mice that overproduce a disease-causing form of Tau, giving them extra LSD1 slows down the process of brain cell death.

The results were published on November 2 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Blocking the interaction between pathological Tau and LSD1 could be a potential therapeutic strategy for Alzheimer’s and other diseases, says senior author David Katz, PhD, associate professor of cell biology at Emory University School of Medicine.

“Our data suggest that inhibition of LSD1 may be the critical mediator of neurodegeneration caused by pathological Tau,” Katz says. “Our intervention was sufficient to preserve cells at a late stage, when pathological Tau had already started to form.”

While the Katz lab’s research was performed in mice, they have indications that their work is applicable to human disease. They’ve already observed that LSD1 abnormally accumulates in neurofibrillary tangles in brain tissue samples from Alzheimer’s patients.

First author Amanda
Engstrom, PhD

Mutations in the gene encoding Tau also cause other neurodegenerative diseases such as frontotemporal dementia and progressive supranuclear palsy. In these diseases, the Tau protein accumulates in the cytoplasm in an aggregated form, which is enzymatically modified in abnormal ways. The aggregates are even thought to travel from cell to cell.

Tau is normally present in the axons of neurons, while LSD1 goes to the nucleus. LSD1’s normal function is as an “epigenetic enforcer”, repressing genes that are supposed to stay off.

“Usually LSD1 and Tau proteins would pass each other, like ships in the night,” Katz says. “Tau only ends up in the cytoplasm of neurons when it is in its pathological form, and in that case the ships seem to collide.”

Former graduate student Amanda Engstrom PhD, the first author of the paper, made a short video that explains how she and her colleagues think LSD1 and Tau are coming into contact.

Read more

Posted on by Quinn Eastman in Neuro Leave a comment

Mother’s milk is OK, even for the in-between babies

“Stop feeding him milk right away – just to be safe” was not what a new mother wanted to hear. The call came several days after Tamara Caspary gave birth to fraternal twins, a boy and a girl. She and husband David Katz were in the period of wonder and panic, both recovering and figuring out how to care for them.

“A nurse called to ask how my son was doing,” says Caspary, a developmental biologist in Emory’s Department of Human Genetics. “She started asking about vomiting and other specific symptoms.”

Her son had tested positive by newborn screening for a rare disorder called galactosemia. Galactosemia is an inherited disease that results from inability to metabolize galactose, a component of human milk and cow-milk-based formula. If a baby with “classic” galactosemia continues to drink milk, the baby may quickly develop symptoms such as jaundice, vomiting and diarrhea, progressing to liver disease and other serious complications that can lead to infant death. If a newborn has classic galactosemia, it is critical for the baby to stop drinking milk and switch to a low-galactose formula, such as soy-based formula, as soon as possible.

Caspary and Katz, a cell biologist, learned several days later that their son did not have classic galactosemia but instead had inherited Duarte galactosemia, a milder, more common form of the metabolic disorder, affecting more than 1 in 5,000 children in the United States. But there was still a looming question.

“We needed to figure out what to feed the baby!” Katz exclaimed, recalling their confusion years later.

The looming question was: what to feed the baby?

Their pediatrician didn’t know what to recommend. Galactosemia, in whatever form, is rare enough in the US that most pediatricians don’t develop experience with it. There was no uniform standard of care, and state-level guidelines for children with Duarte galactosemia varied widely, from no dietary restrictions to banning all milk products for the first year. Some of the limited research available at the time suggested that affected children might experience developmental problems as they grew up. Read more

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New insight into how brain cells die in Alzheimer’s and FTD

Removal of a regulatory gene called LSD1 in adult mice induces changes in gene activity that look unexpectedly like Alzheimer’s disease, scientists have discovered.

Researchers also discovered that LSD1 protein is perturbed in brain samples from humans with Alzheimer’s disease and frontotemporal dementia (FTD). Based on their findings in human patients and mice, the research team is proposing LSD1 as a central player in these neurodegenerative diseases and a drug target.

David Katz, PhD

The results were published Oct. 9 in Nature Communications.

In the brain, LSD1 (lysine specific histone demethylase 1) maintains silence among genes that are supposed to be turned off. When the researchers engineered mice that have the LSD1 gene snipped out in adulthood, the mice became cognitively impaired and paralyzed. Plenty of neurons were dying in the brains of LSD1-deleted mice, although other organs seemed fine. However, they lacked aggregated proteins in their brains, like those thought to drive Alzheimer’s disease and FTD.

“In these mice, we are skipping the aggregated proteins, which are usually thought of as the triggers of dementia, and going straight to the downstream effects,” says David Katz, PhD, assistant professor of cell biology at Emory University School of Medicine. Read more

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Worm collaboration w/Oglethorpe probes neurodegeneration

Emory cell biologist David Katz’s lab has facilitated a collaboration with our neighbors at Oglethorpe University, working with undergraduates on the worm C. elegans and contributing to Alzheimer’s/frontotemporal dementia research. A new article from Oglethorpe describes how C. elegans is ideal for undergraduate biology instruction. Check it out.  

In the photo: Oglethorpe student and Katz lab intern Caitlin May, Oglethorpe biology professor Karen Schmeichel, Elias Castro — also an Oglethorpe student and Katz lab intern, Katz lab postdoc Teresa Lee and David Katz.

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When genes forget to forget

In ancient Greek mythology, the souls of the dead were made to drink from the river Lethe, so that they would forget their past lives. Something analogous happens to genes at the very beginning of life. Right after fertilization, the embryo instructs them to forget what it was like in the egg or sperm where they had come from.

This is part of the “maternal-to-zygote transition”: much of the epigenetic information carried on and around the DNA is wiped clean, so that the embryo can start from a clean slate.

Developmental biologist Lewis Wolpert once said: “It is not birth, marriage or death which is
the most important time in your life, but gastrulation,” referring to when the early embryo separates into layers of cells that eventually make up all the organs. Well, the MZT, which occurs first, comes pretty close in importance.

When this process of epigenetic reprogramming is disrupted, the consequences are often lethal. Emory cell biologists David Katz and Jadiel Wasson discovered that when mouse eggs are missing an enzyme that is critical for the MZT, on the rare instances when the mice survive to adulthood, they display odd repetitive behaviors. Read more

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Chasing invasive cancer cells and more at #ASCB15

Earlier today, we posted a notice on Eurekalert for a Sunday, December 13 presentation by graduate student Jessica Konen at the American Society for Cell Biology meeting in San Diego.

Her research, performed with Adam Marcus at Winship Cancer Institute, was the topic of a video that recently won first prize in a contest sponsored by the Association of American Medical Colleges. This was our video team’s first use of the “fast hand on whiteboard” effect, and a lot of fun to make. The video’s strength grows out of the footage Konen and Marcus have of cancer cells migrating in culture. Check it out, if you haven’t already.

Poster presentations at the 2015 ASCB meeting can be found by searching this PDF. A few Emory-centric highlights:

*Chelsey Ruppersburg and Criss Hartzell’s work on the “nimbus”, a torus-shaped structure enriched in proteins needed to build the cell’s primary cilium

*Anita Corbett on how Emory students have a strong record of attaining their own NIH research funding

*Additional work by Adam Marcus’ lab on the tumor suppressor gene LKB1 and how its loss drives lung cancer cells to take on a “unique amoeboid morphology”

*Research from David Katz’s lab on the “epigenetic eraser” LSD1 (lysine-specific demethylase) and its function in neurons and neurodegeneration Read more

Posted on by Quinn Eastman in Cancer, Neuro Leave a comment