Current Methods in Alzheimer's Disease Research

TOPICAL COLLECTIONS

Guest Editors

Chao Liu

Xuzhou Medical University, Jiangsu Province Key Laboratory of Anesthesiology

Dr. Chao Liu is a professor in Jiangsu Province Key Laboratory of Anesthesiology, Xuzhou Medical University. His major research interest is biological mechanisms of neurodegenerative disease and pain. He holds a doctoral degree of cell biology from the Institute of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. After that, he studied the function of amyloid precursor protein (APP) in neurodegeneration, S-nitosylation of DMT1, and its effect in dopaminergic neurodegeneration during postdoctoral training in National University of Singapore. He is interested in the function of ion channels, transporters and receptors, and their post-translational modifications in neurodegenerative disease.

Miaojin Ji

Xuzhou Medical University, Jiangsu Province Key Laboratory of Anesthesiology

Dr. Miaojin Ji received a Masters in Pharmacology from China Pharmaceutical University in 2014, conducting research on potential drug targets in antidepressant treatment. She received her PhD in Biology in Nanjing University, conducting research on the effects of neuropeptides on motor-emotion intergration. She is currently a Lecturer in Jiangsu Province Key Laboratory of Anesthesiology of Xuzhou Medical University, and her research focuses on the discovery of neuropeptides involved in the pathogenesis of Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) and Major Depression Disorder (MDD). Methods including electrophysiology, techniques in molecular biology, and behavioral tests are being used and developed to understand the mechanism of AD and MDD progression and select novel neuropeptides as targets for therapeutic intervention.

Collection Overview

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a devastating neurodegenerative disease, which demonstrates progressive cognitive declines resulting in severe dementia. Although a large amount of clinical and laboratory work on AD has been done over the last century, including hypotheses related to β-amyloid (Aβ) pathology, mitochondrial dysfunction, tau pathology, oxidative stress, neurotransmitter distces, and neuroinflammation, the pathogenesis of AD remains unknown. Presently, there is no cure for AD, and new drug ment has progressed slowly. One bottleneck is the challenge of setting up accurate methods to test all pathological hallmarks of AD, include biochemical changes, such as Aβ deposition, hyperphosphorylated tau aggregation, synapse and neuron loss, neuroinflammation, and electrophysiological and behavioral cognition impairments. The goal of this collection is to describe a set of important and complementary techniques used to analyze AD critical pathological events and share new differential criteria to determine the effect of drug candidates for AD.