Professor Jing Xu and her students study extremely tiny motor proteins, but their work could make a huge contribution to the growing body of knowledge about Alzheimer’s and other diseases that progressively destroy brain tissue.
Alzheimer’s disease is, so far, untreatable and incurable and is the sixth most common cause of death in adults in the United States. An estimated 5.7 million people have the disease. Dysfunction of a protein called tau is the hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease. Xu’s lab is working to understand how cellular cargos navigate around abnormally high levels of tau proteins on microtubules to keep the cells healthy, rather than degenerating.
Such understanding…
