Week 2 : Establishing a Link
Akash K -
Hi everyone! Currently, my schedule is comprised of reading academic papers to learn about the topic of my project. These papers are rigorous and dense in content, so it usually takes me a few days to read them. I started this week with a discussion of the first paper from last week, and I discussed it with a lab assistant and determined the most important details. After a half hour of discussion, we were able to isolate the main impact of the Lymphatic system: to drain out cellular waste, and now we are looking at the link between the lymphatic system and Alzheimer’s. This was done using a second paper: “Functional aspects of meningeal lymphatics in aging and Alzheimer’s disease“. That paper connected the lymphatic system in the first paper, with the overall theme of my project: Alzheimer’s disease.
According to the paper, the lymphatic system removes the cell waste in the brain’s cells, such as the toxic protein amyloid β. Amyloid β is the protein frequently associated with the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. The paper goes into how injecting lymphatic-boosting cells positively impacts brain function (in the paper, the writer clarifies that decreased brain function is interchangeable with Alzheimer’s disease). In mice without this enhancement, the mice showed decreased brain function as aging progressed. There was a control experiment done where mice had their lymphatic tissue removed from the brain and showed no physical deficiencies (for example, the blood-brain barrier – the membrane between brain tissue and blood- was intact and blood flow was normal). However, in the control group, there was a significant decrease in brain function because of waste buildup as compared to the experimental group. What does this mean? This means that the lymphatic system plays a crucial role in limiting the amount of waste buildup in the brain (amyloid β), and directly correlates to normal brain functions. These findings will be important to my overall project because we could analyze the waste that drains out of the cells into the lymphatic system in search for any unknown proteins that might play a role in decreasing brain functions, which is what my project entails.
Based on the current trajectory of my research, I am anticipating another week of paper reading until I can hopefully get some hands-on work.
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