Epigenomics of Alzheimer’s disease progression
Our susceptibility to disease depends both on the genes that we inherit from our parents and on our lifetime experiences. These two components — nature and nurture — seem to affect very different processes in the context of Alzheimer's disease, according to a new study published today in the journal Nature. The study was carried out by an interdisciplinary team at MIT and the Broad Institute, and was co-led by Li-Huei Tsai, the Picower Professor at MIT and director of the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, and Manolis Kellis, a professor in MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). The researchers analyzed changes that occur in genes and in regions that regulate genes as Alzheimer’s disease progresses, using a mouse model of Alzheimer’s disease that Tsai’s lab originally developed several years ago. The mice were engineered so that the gene for a protein called p25 can be overstimulated in the...