Nelson Lau, PhD, Receives NIH Award to Uncover the Regulatory Mechanisms in Neurodegenerative Disorders such as Alzheimer’s Disease

Nelson C. Lau, PhD, associate professor of biochemistry and director of the Genome Science Institute, has received a five-year, $3.49 million grant from the National Institute on Aging to provide new insight into the molecular etiology of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and AD-related dementias (ADRD).

Transposable elements (TEs) are prolific genetic parasites infiltrating greater than 45 percent of the human genome and are major proportions of all animal genomes. TE activation during aging and aging-related disease (AD and ADRD) affects the transcriptomes of neurons and alters animal activity. His lab studies how the natural RNA interference (RNAi) system recognizes and silences TE transcripts to preserve genome stability.

This award will enable Lau and his team to investigate how TE RNAs activated during aging are regulated by processing into small RNAs via natural RNAi pathways. According to Lau, this research leverages his lab’s previously established investigations of transposon regulation during Drosophila (fruit fly) aging, and will bring new insight into how these TE small RNA levels are affected in diseased states such as AD/ADRD. “The ultimate goal will be to examine how TE RNA regulation is affected during animal aging and in neurodegenerative disorders such as AD, Parkinson’s disease and Huntington’s diseases,” explains Lau.

The brain analysis is a collaboration between the Lau lab and the labs of BUSM’s XiaoLing Zhang, MD, PhD and Thor Stein, MD, PhD.  Zhang will provide human genomics expertise as an already NIH-funded AD Sequencing Project Functional Genomics Consortium (ADSP-FGC) Investigator, while Stein’s lab provides access to human brain samples with diagnosed AD for RNA analysis.