BMI SEMINAR - Webinar // Patrik Verstreken - The cellular basis of Parkinson’s disease

Thumbnail

Event details

Date 07.10.2020
Hour 12:1513:15
Speaker Patrik Verstreken, VIB-KU Leuven Center for Brain & Disease Research, Leuven, Belgium
Location
Category Conferences - Seminars

Parkinson’s disease is affects millions of people around the world.  The disease is characterized by typical movement defects that are caused by the loss of dopaminergic neurons, but several very debilitating non-motor symptoms occur more than 10 years before the motor symptoms.  I will discuss how we study these non-motor symptoms including sleep disturbances and olfactory defects using large collections of knock in fruit flies that model the numerous familial forms of Parkinson’s disease as well as using human iPS cells from patients.  A common emerging theme are defects in protein homeostasis that in specific neuronal cell types, cause cellular defects that explain the Parkinson-relevant phenotypes.  Our work reveals the mechanisms that cause early defects in Parkinson’s disease and it opens therapeutic avenues to start tackling this disease.