Question: what are the discoveries that have lead you up to this current work?

Dawn Lau answered on 20 Jun 2016:

Researchers working on different neurodegenerative diseases, such as Huntington’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and frontotemporal dementia, realised that although these diseases present with different symptoms, they could have common underlying mechanisms that trigger disease. Common symptoms of these diseases include abnormal accumulation of protein clumps in the brain, defective signalling in neurons, and an imbalance of ions in neurons. Scientists thought that although the pathology (the protein clumps we see in the brain) was made of up different types of protein for each disease, all the other symptoms could be caused by broken signalling between the endoplasmic reticulum and the mitochondria. Normally, signalling between these two organelles helps regulate many cell functions, including those that go wrong in disease. So scientists, including our group, looked in disease brain and found that these organelles can’t contact each other as well as they normally can in healthy brain.

That’s where we are now. I am now trying to confirm that this happens in Alzheimer’s disease, and trying to find out what causes the defective signalling between the mitochondria and endoplasmic reticulum in the brain.