The Island

So I'm stuck on an island for the next couple of weeks. Unfortunately, it is is northern Michigan, not Europe, but that's alright. I get to be up here for a class, which is super exciting. But not really, since it's a chemistry class and I'll be stuck inside for like nine hours out of the day. But anyway.

I thought I'd do a bit on myself again, since there's not much to report about Scotland at the moment. I don't know if I mentioned this before, but I'm studying biochemistry, and want to continue on after my undergrad to get into professional research of some sort. In order to kick-start my research career (so soon?!) I joined a research lab at school. I'm involved in Alzheimer's research, which is really cool. And bear with me as I explain what I'm working on, as it can be confusing for some. But here it goes.

A little background as Alzheimer's disease. It's a neurological disease, so it attacks the brain. Alzheimer's disease and diseases like it occur due to neuron tangles, which are literally neurons that get balled up with other neurons and mix pathways and such. This is why people with Alzheimer's disease have such trouble with memory. The lab I am in deals with a protein called tau, which has been linked to Alzheimer's disease in many different studies. It's been shown that something goes wrong somewhere in the life cycle of this protein and causes these neurons to tangle. However, where this thing goes wrong is not known. Which is why making a drug to cure or prevent Alzheimer's is so tricky. My lab is working on figuring this out, and we each have different projects dedicated to it.

My project this summer is trying to figure out how these bad versions of tau are degraded, so that we can enhance that degradation pathway. You might be thinking, don't cells just kill themselves if they aren't working right? Sometimes, yes. But with tau, it is almost being overlooked by the protein that labels things for degradation. But explaining that would take a whole different post. So we have this bad version of tau that is causing neurons to become tangled with each other. There are two different degradation pathways that malfunction proteins can take, either the ubiquitin-proteosome system (this is the basic degradation pathway of most proteins and cells and such) or the autophagy system (this usually kicks in with the presence of certain chemicals or proteins). My job is to try to figure out which system will degrade bad tau more efficiently.

To do this, I get to dissect fly larvae, take out their brains, essentially mash them up, and try to get the neurons to grow in cell culture. When these neurons grow in culture (which took me a semester plus to get to happen), we can treat them with different drugs to enhance certain pathways. For this project, we wanted to focus on autophagy, so we chose two drugs - one that enhances autophagy, and one that stops it from occurring. We will then see which treatment causes the most bad tau to go away.

That is a really broad way of putting it, but I hope it's at least somewhat interesting. I'm excited about it anyway! Until next time...