Alzheimer's Disease: A Challenge for BAPtists and TAUists

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is characterized clinically by a progressive loss of memory and other cognitive functions, resulting in dementia. The cognitive decline is associated with neuron loss and the accumulation in the brain of both extracellular beta-amyloid (Abeta42) containing plaques and intracellular neurofibrillary tangles (NFT). The latter contain hyperphosphorylated tau protein as the major proteinaceous component. Tau pathology is a central neuropathological characteristic of many neurodegenerative disorders that are characterized by dementia. To model tau aggregation and NFT formation in vivo, we gene…