- Department
- Email Address
- [email protected]
- Research Areas
- Research Keywords
- Research Description
The main research interest of the Alpaugh Lab is understanding how proteins contribute to brain disorders such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Huntington’s diseases. This includes two overarching themes, one that aims at understanding how changes to blood vessels during disease affects protein accumulation while the other focusses more specifically on factors outside of a mutation which can cause
- Research Summary
The Alpaugh Lab studies the mechanisms and consequences of protein misfolding in neurodegenerative diseases.
Theme 1- Interactions between the blood-brain barrier and misfolded proteins. Protein accumulation and blood-brain barrier break down are common features of diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Huntington’s diseases. We aim to understand if these two common disease features are related using a human 3D-cell culture model of the blood-brain barrier and human tissue.
Theme 2- Contributions of huntingtin seeding and spreading to Huntington’s disease. The mutant huntingtin protein displays prion-like properties. The Alpaugh lab is tackling the relevance to Huntington’s disease using tissue from human patients with Huntington’s disease phenocopies and Huntington’s disease.- Techniques Used
Animal behaviour, western blotting, immunofluorescence, immunohistochemistry, stereology, confocal imaging, cell culture, iPSC culture, microfluidic systems, filter retardation assays and RT-Quic assays.
- Lab Equipment
Biosafety cabinets, cell culture incubators, cell counter, western blot imager, mimetas OrganoPlate culture system, stereotaxic frame.
- Locations of international collaborators
Germany, Sweden and the UK
- Links