Elizabeth Rhoades, Associate Professor from the Department of Chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania, will be giving a talk on, "Functional mechanisms of dysfunctional proteins."

ABSTRACT

Cell-to-cell transmission of toxic forms of α-Synuclein (αS) is thought to underlie disease progression in Parkinson’s disease. I will describe our efforts to understand the role of neurexin 1β, a presynaptic cell adhesion glycoprotein, in cellular internalization of both monomer and aggregated αS. Our prior work found that extracellular N-linked glycoproteins, and neurexin 1β specifically, had a key role in neuronal uptake of αS. Using a variety of biophysical methods, we characterize the interactions of wild-type and Parkinson’s disease associated point variants of αS with neurexin 1β. Our work provides insight into molecular details of the interaction between αS and neurexin 1β and the resulting cellular internalization of αS.