The nature of "toxic" tau in Alzheimer's disease (AD) has been unclear. During pathogenesis, the importance of tau oligomerization vs. tau phosphorylation is controversial and the investigation of both remains critical toward defining the "toxicity" of tau. The phosphorylation of tau on serines and/or threonines occurs early in the disease course and altering phosphorylation has been shown to d...

Filamentous tau aggregates are hallmark lesions in numerous neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer's disease (AD). Cell culture and animal studies showed that tau fibrils can undergo cell-to-cell transmission and seed aggregation of soluble tau, but this phenomenon was only robustly demonstrated in models overexpressing tau. In this study, we found that intracerebral inoculation of tau...

Glycogen synthase kinase 3beta (GSK3beta) phosphorylates substrates, including the microtubule-associated protein tau, at both primed and unprimed epitopes. GSK3beta phosphorylation of tau negatively regulates tau-microtubule interactions; however the differential effects of phosphorylation at primed and unprimed epitopes on tau is unknown. To examine the phosphorylation of tau at primed and un...

BACKGROUND The time constant of isovolumic relaxation (tau) is an important parameter of ventricular diastolic function, but the need for invasive measurement with high-fidelity catheters has limited its use in general clinical cardiology. The Doppler mitral regurgitant velocity spectrum can be used to estimate left ventricular (LV) pressure throughout systole and may provide a new noninvasive ...

Microtubule-associated protein tau from bovine brain reacted on immunoblots and on enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay with a monoclonal antibody, Alz 50, which has previously been found to bind to an Alzheimer disease-specific antigen. The apparent affinity of binding of Alz 50 to tau was 2.1 X 10(-9) M on competitive enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay, and it was in the same range as for Tau-1 (...

PURPOSE Whether repeated brief seizures can cause neuronal damage is controversial. Cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) total tau (T-tau) and phosphorylated tau (P-tau) measurements have been suggested for the diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease, and T-tau may also be a marker of axonal damage and neuronal degeneration. We studied T-tau and P-tau levels and P-tau/T-tau ratio in CSF after epileptic seizures ...

Tau is a neuronal protein that stabilizes the microtubule (MT) network, but it also forms filaments associated with Alzheimer's disease. Understanding Tau-MT and Tau-Tau interactions would help to establish Tau function in health and disease. For many years, literature reports on Tau-MT binding behavior and affinity have remained surprisingly contradictory (e.g., 10-fold variation in Tau-MT aff...

The density matrix describing the evolution of a spin-3/2 system excited by a quadrupolar-echo sequence consisting of two rf pulses in quadrature phase, (X)-tau 2-(Y)-tau 4-[acquisition(y)], is calculated from the equilibrium state to the acquisition period. The interactions involved are the first-order quadrupolar interaction throughout the experiment and a local heteronuclear magnetic dipolar...

BACKGROUND Aggregates of the tau protein are a hallmark of Alzheimer's and several other neurodegenerative diseases. Various transgenic mouse models have been generated to study the aggregation process. Since wild-type tau is highly soluble and does not aggregate readily, most models make use of tau mutations that occur in human frontotemporal dementias and are more prone to aggregate. These mo...

Stem cell (SC) lines that capture the genetics of disease susceptibility provide new research tools. To assess the utility of mouse central nervous system (CNS) SC-containing neurosphere cultures for studying heritable neurodegenerative disease, we compared neurosphere cultures from transgenic mice that express human tau with the P301L familial frontotemporal dementia (FTD) mutation, rTg(tau(P3...