At the 2014 Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience this past week, Dr. Tong Li presented a new mouse model that mimics Alzheimer’s disease (AD) more faithfully than previous ones. Li and his colleagues showed how amyloid plaques influence tau tangles, two key features in brains of Alzheimer’s, to provoke death of nerve cells and brain atrophy that underlies memory loss (Figure 1). This new model will help scientists to better understand the root cause of this devastating illness and for preclinical drug screening.
Figure 1. A new mouse model of Alzheimer’s disease
The new mouse models recapitulate several key features of AD, including age-dependent development of Aβ plaques, tau tangles and progressive neuronal loss that lead to brain atrophy. (Human AD samples are courtesy of Drs. Juan Troncoso and Olga Pletnikova).