In People Who Defy ApoE, New Alzheimer’s Risk Genes Found
Researchers identified genetic variants that may explain why some ApoE4 carriers remain free of Alzheimer’s, while some ApoE2 carriers do not.
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Researchers identified genetic variants that may explain why some ApoE4 carriers remain free of Alzheimer’s, while some ApoE2 carriers do not.
The first ultrasensitive plasma test for this old marker differentiates Alzheimer’s from healthy controls and non-AD dementias. It segregates people stepwise at phases of pathogenesis down to Braak stages 1 and 2 and below amyloid PET positivity.
Van Leeuwen was best known for finding frameshift mutations in APP and ubiquitin B in the brains of people with tauopathies.
Live imaging of mouse brain reveals that microglia quickly engulf cell bodies while astrocytes dispose of the neuron’s more distal reaches. The cleanup crew tires with age.
People who carry the ApoE4 variant are more likely to succumb to the virus. In vitro, SARS-CoV-2 infects more ApoE4 than ApoE3 brain cells. Astrocytes were activated, neurons degenerated.
Researchers unearthed 75 risk loci, 42 of them new, and nominated candidate genes for each. A polygenic risk score based on all variants predicted AD risk with high accuracy.
In a conditional mouse knockout, lack of neuronal BIN1 slowed excitatory signaling, leading to spatial memory problems. Could this play a role in Alzheimer’s?
Loss-of-function variants in the demethylase TET2 raise a person’s risk for early and late-onset Alzheimer’s, as well as FTD and ALS, suggesting a common mechanism.
In seven papers, researchers presented a dazzling set of findings gleaned from 125,748 exomes and 15,708 genomes housed in a new database. Tidbits emerge on tau, LRRK2, and other proteins implicated in neurodegeneration.
As mice age, a busy receptor-mediated protein transport across the barrier wanes; inhibiting an alkaline phosphatase restores it. Meanwhile, the aging barrier becomes generally leaky to large molecules.
Behold single proteins on the move: Super-resolution microscopy of living cells suggests the infamous protease does not form complexes with other secretases in the plasma membrane—in mouse fibroblasts, that is.
Technical limitations may have misrepresented the transcriptional state of these cells, obscuring detection of their activation signature in frozen postmortem tissue from Alzheimer’s brain.
In mice lacking the recycling protein GGA3, BACE1 trafficking stalls, local Aβ production increases, and axons swell. Does this explain the neuritic dystrophies seen in early AD?
Quantifying 95 post-translational modifications of tau extracted from AD and control brains, a proteomics study proposes a “processive” model of phosphorylation, ubiquitination, acetylation that drive aggregation and map to distinct stages of disease.
Single-cell RNA sequencing of 16,000 live microglia freshly isolated from human brain reveals nine distinct subtypes. One fades in Alzheimer’s. Why?