AI Article Synopsis
- - Current research on Alzheimer's disease is limited because it's hard to test theories using live neurons from patients, and existing animal models don't effectively replicate the disease's complex nature.
- - Induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) offer a promising solution by allowing the creation of patient-specific models from neurons, helping researchers explore the disease in a lab setting.
- - This review focuses on the genetic aspects of Alzheimer's patients and highlights how iPSCs can provide accurate genetic representations and produce relevant neuronal cell types to better understand neurodegenerative diseases.
Article Abstract
A crucial limitation to our understanding of Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the inability to test hypotheses on live, patient-specific neurons. Patient autopsies are limited in supply and only reveal endpoints of disease. Rodent models harboring familial AD mutations lack important pathologies, and animal models have not been useful in modeling the sporadic form of AD because of complex genetics. The recent development of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) provides a method to create live, patient-specific models of disease and to investigate disease phenotypes in vitro. In this review, we discuss the genetics of AD patients and the potential for iPSCs to capture the genomes of these individuals and generate relevant cell types. Specifically, we examine recent insights into the genetic fidelity of iPSCs, advances in the area of neuronal differentiation, and the ability of iPSCs to model neurodegenerative diseases.
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Source |
|---|---|
| http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3221547 | PMC |
| http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/gm265 | DOI Listing |
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