Alzheimer & Parkinson

Clonal hematopoiesis (CH) is associated with many age-related diseases, but its interaction with Alzheimer's disease (AD) remains unclear. Here, we show that TET2-mutant CH is associated with a 47% reduced risk of late-onset AD (LOAD) in the UK Biobank, whereas other drivers of CH do not confer protection. In a mouse model of AD, transplantation of Tet2-mutant bone marrow reduced cognitive decline and β-amyloid plaque formation, effects not observed with Dnmt3a-mutant marrow. Bone-marrow-derived...

Aging is a multifactorial process characterized by cellular dysfunction and increased susceptibility to age-related diseases. The interplay between autophagy and inflammasome has emerged as a critical factor influencing the aging process. Autophagy, which is responsible for degrading damaged cellular components, declines with age, leading to the accumulation of dysfunctional organelles and misfolded proteins. At the same time, the inflammasome, a key mediator of inflammatory responses, becomes...

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Dopaminergic neurons in the ventral midbrain are critical for regulating movement, cognition, and emotion. Ventral midbrain organoids can be used to model both development and diseases of the dopaminergic system, especially Parkinson's disease. Here, we summarize recent advances and remaining challenges in developing such three-dimensional organoids from human pluripotent stem cells. We outline how ventral midbrain organoid systems have progressed from early three-dimensional culture models to...

In recent years, acquired brain injuries (ABIs) have been implicated in the development and pathogenesis of dementia; however, existing data is conflicting and often lacks precise classifications or comprehensive analyses. This review sought to synthesize available evidence to assess the association between four major ABI types-traumatic brain injury (TBI), cerebral atherosclerosis (AS), intracranial hemorrhage, and ischemic stroke-and risk of subsequent all-cause dementia (ACD) and dementia...

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Brain metastasis occurs in up to 40% of patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Considerable genomic heterogeneity exists between the primary lung tumor and respective brain metastasis; however, the identity of the genes capable of driving brain metastasis is incompletely understood. Here, we carried out an in vivo genome-wide CRISPR activation screen to identify molecular drivers of brain metastasis from an orthotopic xenograft model derived from a patient with NSCLC. We found that...

The current depth of site-specific N-glycoproteomics is insufficient to fully characterize glycosylation events in biological samples. Herein, we achieve an ultradeep and precision analysis of the N-glycoproteome of mouse tissues by integrating multiple workflows. The largest N-glycoproteomic dataset to date is established on mice, which contains 91,972 precursor glycopeptides, 62,216 glycoforms, 8939 glycosites and 4563 glycoproteins. The database consists of 6.8 million glyco-spectra...

Proteases recognize substrates by decoding sequence information-an essential cellular process elusive when recognition motifs are absent. Here, we unravel this problem for γ-secretase, an intramembrane-cleaving protease associated with Alzheimer's disease and cancer, by developing Comparative Physicochemical Profiling (CPP), a sequence-based algorithm for identifying interpretable physicochemical features. We show that CPP deciphers a γ-secretase substrate signature with single-residue...

Parkinson disease (PD) is a heterogeneous syndrome. There is a need for biology-driven subtyping to inform specific therapeutic strategies. In a two-center study with de novo and established PD cohorts, we use vesicular acetylcholine transporter ligand [^(18)F]FEOBV brain PET to assess cholinergic systems changes in early to moderate PD. Principal component analysis (PCA) is applied to data from 245 PD subjects to define cholinergic subgroups at baseline. Three PD subgroups are identified:...

Circulating blood factors are critical for homeostasis of the adult ventricular-subventricular (V-SVZ) and subgranular zones, which contain neural stem cells (NSCs) crucial for sustained neurogenesis. Circulating sphingosine-1-phosphate (S1P) bound to apolipoprotein M (ApoM), a principal component of high-density lipoproteins, is involved in various biological processes, but its role in neurogenic niches is poorly understood. Herein, using Apom^(-/-) mice, we show that blood ApoM-S1P deficiency...

The self-assembly of biomolecules through noncovalent interactions is critical in both physiological and pathological processes, as exemplified by the assembly of amyloid β peptide (Aβ) into oligomers or fibrils in Alzheimer's disease (AD). Developing molecules that can modulate this assembly process holds significant mechanistic and therapeutic potential. In this study, we identified glycopeptides as a class of protein aggregation modulators, showing that β-N-acetylgalactosamine...

Previous studies suggest glial and neuronal changes may trigger synaptic dysfunction in Alzheimer's disease (AD), but the link between their markers and synaptic abnormalities in the living brain remains unclear. We investigated the association between glial reactivity and synaptic dysfunction biomarkers in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) from 478 individuals in cognitively unimpaired (CU) and cognitively impaired (CI) individuals. We measured amyloid-β (Aβ), phosphorylated tau (pTau181), astrocyte...

Smelling is a human sense, expressing strong sexual dimorphisms. We aim to improve the knowledge of the genetics of human olfactory perception by performing an exploratory genome-wide association meta-analysis of up to 21,495 individuals of European ancestry. By sex-stratified and overall analysis of the identification of twelve odours and an identification score, we discovered ten independent loci, seven of them novel, with trait-wise genome-wide significance (p < 5 × 10^(-8)) involving five...

To understand how aging affects functional decline and increases disease risk, it is necessary to develop measures of how fast a person is aging. Using data from the Dunedin Study, we introduce an accurate and reliable measure for the rate of longitudinal aging derived from cross-sectional brain magnetic resonance imaging, that is, the Dunedin Pace of Aging Calculated from NeuroImaging (DunedinPACNI). Exporting this measure to the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative, UK Biobank and...

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The canonical Alzheimer's Disease (AD) pathological cascade posits that the accumulation of amyloid beta (Aβ) is the initiating event, accelerating the accumulation of tau in the entorhinal cortex (EC), which subsequently spreads into the neocortex. Here in a multi-cohort study (ADNI, A4, HABS-HD) of 1354 participants with multimodal imaging and genetic information we queried how genetic variation affects these stages of the AD cascade. We observed that females and APOE-ε4 homozygotes are more...

While deep brain stimulation (DBS) remains an effective therapy for Parkinson's disease (PD), sources of variance in patient outcomes are still not fully understood, underscoring a need for better prognostic criteria. Here, we leveraged routinely collected T1-weighted (T1-w) magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data to derive patient-specific measures of brain structure and evaluate their usefulness in predicting changes in PD medications in response to DBS. Preoperative T1-w MRI data from 231...

Extracellular vesicles (EVs) in plasma are composed of exosomes, microvesicles, and apoptotic bodies. We report a plasma EV enrichment strategy using magnetic beads called Mag-Net. Proteomic interrogation of this plasma EV fraction enables the detection of proteins that are beyond the dynamic range of liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry of unfractionated plasma. Mag-Net is robust, reproducible, inexpensive, and requires <100 μL plasma input. Coupled to data-independent mass spectrometry, we...

Alzheimer's disease (AD), the leading cause of senile dementia, lacks effective therapies. While microglia are central to AD pathology, key therapeutic targets remain unclear. Here we identify microglial connexin43 (Cx43) hemichannels as a regulator of microglial reactivity in AD, positioning them as a promising therapeutic target. Post-mortem AD patient tissue showed elevated Cx43 levels in periplaque microglia. In the APP(swe)/PS1(dE9) (APP/PS1) mouse model of amyloidosis, we demonstrated that...