JoVE | Peer Reviewed Scientific Video Journal

TOPICAL COLLECTIONS

Current Methods in ALS Research

Guest Editors

Sandrine Da Cruz

VIB KU-Leuven

Prof. Da Cruz obtained her PhD in Cell Biology at the University of Geneva, Switzerland in 2005. After her post-doctoral training and stay as a research scientist on pathogenic mechanisms underlying ALS at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research at the University of California San Diego, USA, she became assistant professor in 2016 at the Ludwig Institute, San Diego. Since 2019, she has been a group leader and professor of the Laboratory of Neurophysiology in Neurodegenerative Disorders at the VIB‑KU Leuven Center for Brain and Disease Research and Department of Neurosciences at KU Leuven, Belgium. Her laboratory focuses on disease mechanisms and therapy development for ALS and frontotemporal dementia. In particular, her team investigates the contribution of local axonal translation and demixing/aggregation to muscle denervation and axonal loss in FUS and TDP-43-mediated diseases to ultimately identify new therapeutic targets for the treatment of neuromuscular disorders.

Ludo Van Den Bosch

VIB KU-Leuven

Prof. Van Den Bosch received his PhD in the field of physiology at KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium in 1990. After postdoctoral research in molecular biology and neurodegeneration, he joined the Laboratory of Neurobiology at KU Leuven as assistant professor. Since 2014, he has served as group leader of the Laboratory of Neurobiology at the VIB‑KU Leuven Center for Brain and Disease Research, Leuven, Belgium. The laboratory focuses on motor neuron diseases, such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), as well as hereditary motor neuropathies and frontotemporal dementia (FTD). The central goal is to understand more about the mechanisms of axonal and neuronal degeneration and regeneration in order to unravel new therapeutic strategies for neurodegenerative disorders, including ALS.

Yvonne E. Klingl

VIB KU-Leuven

Yvonne Klingl studied chemistry and biochemistry graduating as MSc in Chemistry in 2017 at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich (LMU) in Germany. For her Master's thesis, she visited the laboratory of Jacob Hooker at the MGH/HST Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging (Cambridge, MA, USA) and performed research in chemical biology and biochemistry. Since 2017, she has been working toward a PhD investigating HDAC6, using interdisciplinary tools from chemistry, chemical biology, and imaging to study neurobiology in the Laboratory of Neurobiology of Prof. Ludo Van Den Bosch at the VIB‑KU Leuven Center for Brain and Disease Research, Leuven, Belgium.

Collection Overview

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a devastating neurodegenerative disease characterized by the progressive death of motor neurons and muscle denervation. This leads to respiratory failure within 3 to 5 years and current treatments only modestly slow down progression, extending the lifespan by a few months. Although multiple research strategies have helped the field to progress considerably, effective treatments are still lacking. Multiple pathobiological mechanisms could be linked to ALS pathology, such as glutamate excitotoxicity, oxidative stress, neuroinflammation, proteotoxicity, mitochondrial dysfunction, phase transition, defects in axonal transport, protein translation, and nucleocytoplasmic transport. This methods collection aims to provide reproducible methodologies for the study of ALS phenotypes in vitro and in vivo for use in therapeutics research and other translational opportunities for ALS.