I am presenting on Parkinson’s Disease, a neurodegenerative disease caused by the slow death of dopamine neurons. My lab investigated how the structure of synaptic vesicles changed with aging and the abnormal and toxic expression of a protein called alpha-Synuclein.
Parkinson’s Disease impacts around 1 million Americans over 65, although research has been going on for decades, there is no cure. This neurodegenerative disease is caused by the gradual loss of dopamine-producing neurons. This paper focuses on the underlying mechanism that leads to Parkinson’s Disease. Specifically, it looks at how synaptic vesicles (SV)—which store and release neurotransmitters—change in structure with aging and varying protein expression. One key protein, alpha-Synuclein (aSyn), helps regulate vesicle release and recycling, but when it aggregates inside the neuron, it becomes toxic and leads to neuronal dysfunction and cell death. The goal of this research was to determine whether aSyn is responsible for specific progressive changes in SV composition. In order to study this, researchers extracted SVs and quantified the proteins within them. It was found that the proteins that help regulate synaptic function had a significant change in abundance. This change was most prevalent in 10 month old mice. This data indicates that aging has an effect on synucleinopathy which remodels the SV structure, causing the machinery responsible for neurotransmitter release to be reorganized. These findings contribute to our understanding of synaptic dysfunction in PD, and provide a baseline for future work and knowledge of age and disease related changes in SVs.
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Barzel Ben-Dov - Elevator Speech and Video-5/15/2026, 9:43 AM.mp4