Structures, stabilities, and formation kinetics of amyloid beta precursors and oligomers
2013 Seed Grant
Yongli Zhang, Ph.D.
Department of Cell Biology
Yale University
Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a prevailing disease with no treatment. AD is caused by imbalanced production and clearance of Abeta peptides in the brain, leading to neurotoxic Abeta oligomers. Current efforts to treat AD have been focused on reducing Abeta production and oligomerization. Yet both processes are not well understood, despite extensive research in the past decades based on the traditional experimental approaches typically with over a billion molecules. Dr. Zhang’s lab proposes to characterize the dynamical structures and stabilities of Abeta precursors and oligomers at a single molecule level, using combined single-molecule approaches. They believe that the novel approaches will provide significant new insights into AD pathogenesis, diagnosis, and therapy.
