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Authors & Affiliations
Daniel Heinzer-Avar, Eric Sun, Pauline Chu, Dhananjay Wagh, Hannes Vogel, Anne Brunet
Abstract
Corpora amylacea (CAs) are a type of polyglucosan bodies that are generally found in a variety of organs during aging, including the human brain. While CAs in the human brain mainly consist of abnormal glycogen molecules, they also contain a set of proteins including Ubiquitin and p62, which are usually involved in cellular degradation pathways. The abundance of CAs is strikingly increased in neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease (AD), suggesting that the occurrence of CAs might either be a protective mechanism or a co-morbidity in the aging human brain. To understand the formation and effects of corpora amylacea, we applied GeoMx Digital Spatial Profiler to detect spatially resolved differences in transcriptomic profiles in the alveus, a white-matter structure in the human brain, and compared the profiles of young, old, and AD patients. Our goal is to uncover age-dependent dysregulated pathways in brain regions that contain CAs. Our study should generate new hypotheses about the emergence of CAs during the aging process and provide insight into the complex mechanisms underlying human brain aging.