The Alzheimer’s Disease/Parkinson’s disease (AD/PD) 2023 annual conference (https://adpd.kenes.com/) begins tomorrow and will continue through Saturday, April 1. The virtual conference provides 6 full days of scientific presentations and symposia including a mix of pre-recorded oral presentations and live discussions with presenters.The Cruchaga lab is represented by 13 of our own researchers who are presenting […]
News
2023 Pilot Grant
The Neurogenomics and Informatics (NGI) Center (https://neurogenomics.wustl.edu/) is requesting proposals for a new pilot grant program. The vision of the NGI is to transform the field of human neurogenomics by going beyond the analysis of genomic DNA to explore other omics layers, including epigenomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics. Molecular phenotyping of human samples is instrumental […]
NGI Pilot Grant
The Neurogenomics and Informatics (NGI) Center (https://neurogenomics.wustl.edu/) is requesting proposals for a new pilot grant program. The vision of the NGI is to transform the field of human neurogenomics by going beyond the analysis of genomic DNA to explore other omics layers, including epigenomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics. Molecular phenotyping of human samples is instrumental […]
NGI at the AAIC
The Alzheimer’s Association International Conference (AAIC 2021) is underway virtually as well as in-person in Denver, Colorado. The hybrid conference started Monday and continues through Friday July 30. Sessions at the meeting focus on clinical treatment and research of Alzheimer disease including biomarkers, disease prevention and treatment, social determinants, and genetics of the disease. This […]
Largest Brain and CSF pQTL Analysis Published in Nature Neuroscience
Chengran Yang, a PhD candidate in the lab of Carlos Cruchaga, is the first author of a manuscript just published in the prestigious journal Nature Neuroscience. He used multi-tissue proteomics to identify hundreds of proteins that are genetically regulated. By using statistical methods, such as Mendelian randomization, he was able to implicate several of these […]
The NGI is Well Represented at the 2021 AD/PD Conference
The Alzheimer’s Disease/Parkinson’s disease (AD/PD) annual conference began yesterday and will continue through Sunday, March 14. The virtual conference provides 6 full days of scientific presentations and symposia including a mix of pre-recorded oral presentations and live discussions with presenters. The NGI is represented by 10 of our own researchers who are presenting their recent […]
Workshop: Application of Machine Learning Tools to Omics in Neuroscience
The NGI will be hosting a Workshop on the “Application of Machine Learning Tools to Omics in Neuroscience” on February 18, 2021. This full-day, virtual event will feature basic introductory sessions on Machine Learning, plenary lectures by invited speakers, oral presentations of submitted abstracts, and a round table discussion. Everyone is invited to register by […]
MS4A4A is the major regulator of TREM2 levels
Drs. Harari, Benitez, Karch and Cruchaga leveraged biospecimens obtained from large and well-characterized human cohorts to identify a novel protective gene for Alzheimer disease, MS4A4A, that is also the major regulator of TREM2. This study provides a strong evidence of a biological link between TREM2 and MS4A4A in microglia in the context of AD. However, […]
Drs. Cruchaga and Karch receive new funding to advance personalized medicine in Alzheimer Disease
Drs. Cruchaga and Karch are some of the Washington University investigators that received funding from Centene to perform molecular phenotyping of Alzheimer’s cases to identify novel molecular biomarkers and the identification of novel therapeutically targets. Specifically we plan to develop a personalized medicine approach to understand the effects of Alzheimer’s disease risk genes by combining […]
Novel protective variants for Alzheimer’s Disease risk identified
A study led Dr. Kauwe lab and in collaboration with Drs. Karch and Cruchaga identified rare variants in RAB10 that protects against Alzheimer’s Disease risk. In this study Dr. Karch lab performed the functional studies and Dr. Cruchaga lab contributed genetic data. A video explaining the findings can be found below:
Using Genetics to predict risk for AD at individual level (Links to an external site)
Dr. Cruchaga discuss about the use of polygenic risk scores to predict individual level risk for Alzheimer and provide this data “direct-to-consumer”.
Mendelian Neurodegenerative mutations and 23&me (Links to an external site)
In collaboration with Alzforum Dr. Cruchaga analyses the impact of direct-to-consumer genetic testing.
Our work presented at the AAIC2017 was highlighted by Alzforum (Links to an external site)
Geneticists are inventing new ways to hunt AD variants that went undetected in GWAS and might shed light on AD pathogenesis. Many labs are searching for polymorphisms tied to specific quantitative traits. As Yuetiva Deming from Carlos Cruchaga’s group at Washington University, St. Louis, pointed out, GWAS identify risk variants but say nothing about how that risk manifests
MS4A Alzheimer’s Risk Gene Linked to TREM2 Signaling (Links to an external site)
Leveraging IPS-derived neurons and brain tissue to identify novel genes implicated on Frontotemporal Dementia (Links to an external site)
R406W causes a specific form of frontotemporal dementia. We found that GABAergic dysfunction in postmortem tissue from people with sporadic FTD or progressive supranuclear palsy, but not in Alzheimer’s disease. Also highlighted in Alzforum: https://www.alzforum.org/news/research-news/stem-cell-model-nails-link-between-tauopathy-and-gabaergic-dysfunction
Analysis of TREM2 structure (Links to an external site)
Great collaboration with Dr. Brett and Colona lab
Cruchaga lab got more than $7 million from NIH to study Alzheimer’s genetics (Links to an external site)
The studies are funded by two grants totaling $7 million from the National Institute on Aging of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and led by Carlos Cruchaga, an Professor of psychiatry and of neurology at the School of Medicine
Harari and Cruchaga lab develop a new digital deconvolution for brain RNA-seq data (Links to an external site)
Our computer method determined the proportions of each cell type — neurons, astrocytes, oligodendrocytes, microglial cells — and found that specific gene variants were linked to different proportions of these cell types.
The NeuroGenomics and Informatics leaders receive funding from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (Links to an external site)
Drs. Harari, Cruchaga and Karch received funded from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to understand the relationship between MS4A4A and TREM2
PLD3 a new AD gene (Nature)
Our last study, published in Nature identified a new gene (PLD3) for Alzheimer’s disease.In this study, in which all the members from the lab (Peter Jin, Bruno Benitez, Yefei Cai, Jiyoon Choi and Breanna Cooper) and were involved, as well as several members from Dr. Goate lab, used exome-sequencing in late-onset (AD) families to identify […]