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SUMMARY:Losing sleep over the spread of Alzheimer's disease - Damian Crowt
 her (University of Cambridge)
DTSTART:20140204T174500Z
DTEND:20140204T193000Z
UID:TALK50388@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:21255
DESCRIPTION:This will allow me to talk about two areas of current interest
  in Alzheimer's research that we are working on.\nThe first is that intera
 ction between circadian rhythms and the disease: it is known that people w
 ith Alzheimer's disease (AD) dont sleep well at night and snooze during th
 e day - rather than having a clear demarcation between activity and sleep.
  It is not known whether this behavioural arrhythmia is due to loss of the
  clock circuitry or whether it is due to peripheral clock oscillators igno
 ring the central clock.  We have recreated this phenotype in our Drosophil
 a model of AD and find that the flies become arrhythmic despite their cent
 ral clock continuing to tick normally.  I will discuss this data and it's 
 relevance for patients and present a novel method for linking behaviour to
  clock activity in the flies.\nAs second part of the talk will focus on th
 e measurement of protein aggregation seeding in tissues and correlating th
 at with disease activity.  I will talk about how we have developed an assa
 y that we think can detect the seeding of the protein aggregation that und
 erpins diseases such as AD.  I will describe how we are trying to commerci
 alise this assay.
LOCATION:Winstanley Lecture Theatre
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