Scientists at Alabama’s HudsonAlpha awarded NIH grant to study gene involved in various dementias

By: HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology

Dementias, like Alzheimer’s disease and frontotemporal dementia, are characterized by the progressive loss of brain cells due mostly to damage associated with aberrant protein aggregates. Two labs at the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology work on understanding why this damage occurs and how it can be prevented, focusing their efforts largely on the underlying genetics of the diseases.

HudsonAlpha faculty investigators Nick Cochran, Ph.D., and Rick Myers, Ph.D., along with Danielle Swaney, Ph.D., of University of California San Francisco, were recently awarded a five-year, $3.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to further study MAPT, the gene that codes for tau, one of the proteins that forms aggregates in the brain in many neurodegenerative diseases.

Cochran and Myers are both experts in gene regulation, the process by which cells control the timing, location and amount of gene expression. Specific proteins called transcription factors bind to DNA and either recruit other proteins to activate gene expression or block the binding of necessary proteins, thus repressing gene expression.

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