Congrats to Reuben Matthews, an undergrad in the lab who is attending the Society for Neuroscience and presenting a poster on mitochdonrial DNA copy number and neurodegenerative diseases. Reuben has been in the lab for about a year and has driven a new collaboration between us and Jennifer Donegan’s lab here at UT who is interested in neurodegeneration.
Reuben and Jennifer’s student Sifallah have been working together on a meta-analysis asking whether patients with neurodegenerative diseases have different numbers of mtDNA genome copies compared to a control population. So far, they’ve found a weak signal for lower mtDNA CN associated with neurodegeneration, but lots of heterogeneity among studies. Some of that variation can be explain by which disease was being investigated, which tissue was used for sampling, and which geographic location the population came from. But, lots of variation remain and we’re not sure why some studies find a big effect and others don’t.
Reuben will be following up on this with a lab experiment using mice genetic models for different neurodegenerative diseases and examining mt CN in different tissues.