Alzheimer’s Disease is the most common form of dementia, affecting 48 million people worldwide. Despite this fact, only 45% of the patients have received the diagnose. The reason behind this is the fact that the cause of the disease is still unclear. Several hypotheses have been suggested, with main focus in the imbalance between the production and the clearance of Αβ in the brain (formation of plaques) or hyperphosphorylation of the tau protein (formation of tangles). In order to have a better understanding of what is actually happening in the brain, more biomarkers need to be developed. Keeping this in mind, we tried to develop a method to monitor the protein levels of SAP in the brain. SAP is a glycoprotein, normally produced by the liver in acute phase immune responses. SAP has been correlated with AD in the 1980s and quite recently it has been shown that SAP is elevated in AD patients, but not in individuals with plaques and no dementia. For this reason, we developed a mass spectrometry based targeted quantification method for monitoring SAP in the brain, as well as C9, a blood contamination reference protein. Our method is robust enough to be further used in large studies, in order to investigate the role of SAP in AD.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:uu-297654 |
| Date | January 2016 |
| Creators | Gkanatsiou, Eleni |
| Publisher | Uppsala universitet, Institutionen för biologisk grundutbildning, The Sahlgrenska Academy, Department of Psychiatry and Neurochemistry |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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