Project description:Despite the discovery of PMX205 more than 20 years ago and its reported beneficial effects in Alzheimer’s disease, the specific mechanism that might be driving the improvement in cognition are still not know. Here, we used the Tg2576 mouse model of Alzheimer’s disease and treated them with PMX205 at the onset of the amyloid pathology to further determine the effects of this C5aR1 antagonist on microglial cells. The results presented in this study demonstrated a neuroprotective effect of PMX205, which rescues the excessive synaptic pruning and synapse loss associated with Alzheimer’s disease. This finding seems to be linked to the reduction of a unique microglial subpopulation associated to synaptic pruning in the PMX205 treated mice. Interestingly, we also show here that blocking C5a-C5aR1 signaling in the Tg2576 mouse model of AD results in the increase of the DAM2 microglial subpopulation, suggesting that PMX205 might be inducing a disease mitigating phenotype on microglial cells. Our data further supports the use of C5aR1 antagonists as potential therapeutic targets to treat or slow the progression of Alzheimer’s disease.
Project description:Recently genome-wide association studies have identified significant association between Alzheimer’s disease and variations in CLU, PICALM, BIN1, CR1, MS4A4/MS4A6E, CD2AP, CD33, EPHA1 and ABCA7. However, the pathogenic variants in these loci have not yet been found. We conducted a genome-wide scan for large copy number variations (CNVs) in a dataset of Caribbean Hispanic origin (554 controls and 559 cases with late-onset Alzheimer’s disease) that was previously investigated in a SNP-based genome-wide association study using Illumina HumanHap 650Y platform. We ran four CNV calling algorithms and analyzed rare large CNVs (>100 Kb) to obtain high-confidence calls that were detected by at least two algorithms. In total, 734 such CNVs were observed in our dataset. Global burden analyses did not reveal significant differences between cases and controls in CNV rate, distribution of deletions or duplications, total or average CNV size; and number of genes affected by CNVs. However, we observed a nominal association between Alzheimer’s disease and a ~470 Kb duplication on chromosome15q11.2 (P=0.037). This duplication, encompassing up to five genes (TUBGCP5, CYFIP1, NIPA2, NIPA1 and WHAMML1) was present in 10 cases (2.6%) and 3 controls (0.8%). The dosage increase of CYFIP1 and NIPA1 genes was further confirmed by quantitative PCR. The current study did not detect CNVs (including common CNVs) that affect novel Alzheimer’s disease loci reported by large genome-wide association studies. However, since the array technology used in our study has limitations in detecting small CNVs, future studies must carefully assess novel AD associated genes for the presence of disease related CNVs. Case-control analysis, screening of large copy number variation in 559 Alzheimer cases and 554 control subjects of Caribbean Hispanic ancestry
Project description:Protein post-translational modifications (PTMs) serve as diagnostic markers in Alzheimer’s disease. We aimed to discover new PTMs in the context of this disease from MS/MS-based proteomic datasets. Publicly available label-free proteomics data were searched for select PTMs using SEQUEST-HT. Only high-confidence PTMs were analyzed further using bioinformatics analysis. We identified 4,961 unique modified peptides corresponding to 1,856 proteins from datasets pertaining to Alzheimer’s disease. Of these, 52 proteins were known to be involved in Alzheimer’s pathway. Also, 3,164 PTMs are reported to be novel in the context of this disease. Further, protein quantification reveals expression of 13 high-abundant secretary proteins across multiple studies which can be exploited as biomarkers. Identification of novel PTMs from the publicly available proteomic data may provide novel molecular insights in the progression and management of Alzheimer’s disease. Novel high abundant secretory proteins identified can be candidate CSF biomarkers in Alzheimer’s disease.
Project description:Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a chronic neurodegenerative disorder that is characterized by progressive neuropathology and cognitive decline. We performed a cross-tissue analysis of methylomic variation in AD using samples from three independent human post-mortem brain cohorts. We identified a differentially methylated region in the ankyrin 1 (ANK1) gene that was associated with neuropathology in the entorhinal cortex, a primary site of AD manifestation. This region was confirmed as being substantially hypermethylated in two other cortical regions (superior temporal gyrus and prefrontal cortex), but not in the cerebellum, a region largely protected from neurodegeneration in AD, or whole blood obtained pre-mortem from the same individuals. Neuropathology-associated ANK1 hypermethylation was subsequently confirmed in cortical samples from three independent brain cohorts. This study represents, to the best of our knowledge, the first epigenome-wide association study of AD employing a sequential replication design across multiple tissues and highlights the power of this approach for identifying methylomic variation associated with complex disease. For the first (discovery) stage of our analysis, we used multiple tissues from donors (N = 122) archived in the MRC London Brainbank for Neurodegenerative Disease. From each donor, we isolated genomic DNA from four brain regions (EC, superior temporal gyrus (STG), prefrontal cortex (PFC) and CER) and, where available, from whole blood obtained pre-mortem. Our analyses focused on identifying differentially methylated positions (DMPs) associated with Braak staging, a standardized measure of neurofibrillary tangle burden determined at autopsy.