Our paper is Online and Open Access!

Finally, our rhesus monkey model of Alzheimer's is fully characterized and ready for drug therapy testing! What did we do? 1/5 alz-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/al…
Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a devastating condition with no effective treatments, and promising findings in rodents constantly failing to translate into successful therapies for patients. To develop an AD model closer to humans, we used rhesus monkeys, and targeted the vulnerable entorhinal cortex, delivering a dual tau mutation into the region. During a 3 or 6 months period, we longitudinally collected all possible samples for biomarker analysis:
spinal fluid, plasma, structural MRI, Tau PET Scan and combined these data with high-resolution microscopy analysis of brain tissue. 2/5

It's #FluorescentFriday!
What happens in the brain during normal aging?
While most neurons will not shrink, they will lose synapses, the connections between different neurons, which can affect learning and memory.
But how do we take these images from primates? (1/5) Since genetic manipulations are hard to perform in primates, we apply an electric current to inject fluorescent dye into individual neurons in this type of image. Check the video below: (2/5)