New piperazine multi-effect drugs prevent neurofibrillary degeneration and amyloid deposition, and preserve memory in animal models of Alzheimer's disease.

Alzheimer's Disease is a devastating dementing disease involving amyloid deposits, neurofibrillary tangles, progressive and irreversible cognitive impairment. Today, only symptomatic drugs are available and therapeutic treatments, possibly acting at a multiscale level, are thus urgently needed. To that purpose, we designed multi-effects compounds by synthesizing drug candidates derived by substituting a novel N,N'-disubstituted piperazine anti-amyloid scaffold and adding acetylcholinesterase inhibition property.

Defining the human sperm microtubulome: an integrated genomics approach.

Sperm motility notably depends on the structural integrity of the flagellum and the regulation of microtubule dynamics. Although researchers have started to use "omics" techniques to characterize the human sperm's molecular landscape, the constituents responsible for the assembly, organization, and dynamics of the flagellum microtubule have yet to be fully defined. In this study, we defined a core set of 116 gene products associated with the human sperm microtubulome (including products potentially involved in abnormal ciliary phenotypes and male infertility disorders).

Two-Dimensional Electrophoresis Protocols to Analyze the Microtubule-Associated Tau Proteins from Several Biological Sources.

Technology breakthrough in proteomics enables to gather qualitative and quantitative information about a protein or a complex mixture of proteins. Two-dimensional gel electrophoresis remains an interesting technique, which provides an overview of the complexity of isovariants from a single protein when coupled to western blotting. Here, we describe a detailed protocol for the two-dimensional analysis of microtubule-associated Tau isovariants from cell to human or mouse brain tissue.

Reduced Tau protein expression is associated with frontotemporal degeneration with progranulin mutation.

Reduction of Tau protein expression was described in 2003 by Zhukareva et al. in a variant of frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD) referred to as diagnosis of dementia lacking distinctive histopathology, then re-classified as FTLD with ubiquitin inclusions. However, the analysis of Tau expression in FTLD has not been reconsidered since then.

Functional screening of Alzheimer risk loci identifies PTK2B as an in vivo modulator and early marker of Tau pathology.

A recent genome-wide association meta-analysis for Alzheimer's disease (AD) identified 19 risk loci (in addition to APOE) in which the functional genes are unknown. Using Drosophila, we screened 296 constructs targeting orthologs of 54 candidate risk genes within these loci for their ability to modify Tau neurotoxicity by quantifying the size of >6000 eyes. Besides Drosophila Amph (ortholog of BIN1), which we previously implicated in Tau pathology, we identified p130CAS (CASS4), Eph (EPHA1), Fak (PTK2B) and Rab3-GEF (MADD) as Tau toxicity modulators.