Wednesday 17th January

Today Mariana Vargas Cabellero, research lecturer in biological science, treated us to a overview of her work into synapses in Alzheimer’s disease.

Mariana uses experimental models of Alzheimer’s disease to establish if early changes to synapses contribute to memory loss. Using clever ways of inducing and suppressing amyloid at different time points during diseases development she can find out if diseased neurons can be rescued from degeneration. Increased expression of amyloid reduces neuronal function as measured by a reduction in short term and long term memory. By using electrophysiology it was shown that these changes to neurons start very early (few weeks) after exposure to amyloid which worsens over time. Mariana explains that this is due to a reduction in synaptic plasticity and the hippocampus is trying to compensate as a reaction to the increased level of amyloid.

Remarkably, suppressing the expression of amyloid can rescue the changes in neuronal plasticity. How can we explain this?

Is it synaptic proteins, signalling pathways, or tau? All these are questions to be answered in Mariana’s ongoing work.