Wolozin Webinar on Stress Granules, Feb. 15

On Tuesday, Feb. 15 at noon (EST) BUSM Professor Ben Wolozin MD, PhD, BUSM professor, department of Pharmacology, will participate in a webinar on stress granules and their relevance to neurodegeneration. He will be joined by his colleagues and will share some of their latest research. This webinar is sponsored by the Alzheimer’s Research Forum.

The formation of cytoplasmic inclusions called stress granules is one of nature’s many ways of coping with adverse situations. It appears that these inclusions sequester non-essential messenger RNAs, allowing cells to focus on making proteins, such as chaperones, that protect against a variety of stressful insults. Recent work suggests that stress granules may figure in the pathogenesis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and frontotemporal lobar degeneration, where stress granule markers decorate pathological protein aggregates in affected neurons. What do stress granules do in disease? Are they part of the problem or part of the solution? What about AD?