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Probing The Early Stages Of Polyglutamine Aggregation With Computational Methods, Andreas Vitalis

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

Exonic CAG repeat diseases are a class of neurodegenerative age-of-onset diseases caused by an unstable trinucleotide expansion in a coding region of a gene. The most prominent example is Huntington's disease: HD) whose symptoms are characterized by loss of motor control and cognitive deficits. For all nine of the known CAG repeat diseases, pathology is ascribed to the mutant proteins which carry expanded stretches of glutamine residues: polyglutamine). The length of the polyglutamine segment is inversely correlated with the disease age-of-onset. Protein aggregates are routinely found in postmortem tissue samples of brains of HD patients. These findings suggest a prominent …