Please note the following MSSA2017 important dates

At the recent microscopy conference, hosted by the Microscopy Society of Southern Africa (MSSA) in Port Elisabeth in Dec 2016, three SU students from the Department of Physiological Sciences won prizes for their research performed. Innovative microscopy techniques were implemented to unravel research questions around Alzheimer’s disease and neuronal cell death as well as brain cancer. Dumisile Lumkwana received the ‘Wirsam Light Microscopy Prize - Best presentation’ for presenting data of her PhD work, Jurgen Kriel was awarded the Wirsam Scientific Prize - Best Student Paper Life Sciences’ for his MSc research and Yigael Powrie received the ‘SA Scientific Award – Best Presentation Confocal Microscopy’ for his MSc work.
 
‘This is a wonderful achievement and testimony for the excellent and hard  work, a happy moment for me’, said their supervisor Dr Ben Loos, who heads up the Neuro-Research Group at the department of Physiological Sciences, Stellenbosch University.

Modulation of autophagy has been shown to have therapeutic potential for Alzheimer’s disease through favouring the clearance of aggregate prone proteins such as amyloid-? and p-Tau. Recent research has shown that spermidine and rilmenidine have the potential to affect autophagy, but the exact relationship between autophagy, protein clearance and cell death remains unclear. Moreover, the impact of concentration differences on autophagic flux and on subsequent protein clearance and neuronal toxicity is uncertain. Therefore, we aimed to characterize the autophagic profile of rilmenidine and spermidine to assess the degree of protection and protein clearance in a paraquat induced neuronal toxicity model of Alzheimer’s disease.

 
We found that spermidine and rilmenidine modulate autophagic flux in a concentration dependent manner. Both these agents up-regulated autophagy, improved cell viability through clearance of protein aggregates and protected the cells against paraquat induced neuronal toxicity. In addition, spermidine protects against mitochondrial and tubulin network damage. These findings suggest that precision controlled induction of autophagy may be a suitable pharmacological target for preserving neuronal cell viability in Alzheimer’s disease. Future work is required to better quantify autophagic flux.

Stellenbosch University

The MSc study entailed investigating the relationship between the neuronal microtubulin cytoskeleton and the protein degradation process called autophagy, a system known to be dysfunctional in Alzheimer’s disease. We sought to elucidate previously unknown molecular events that occur prior to the onset of cell death brought on by induced autophagy dysfunction and in doing so highlight potentially new targets for therapeutic intervention in the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease.

Stellenbosch University

IMAGE: Micrograph of a mouse brain cell stained with fluorescent antibodies to visualize the microtubulin cytoskeleton (Green), Spastin (Red) - a protein known to interact with microtubulin and the nucleus (Blue).