One-year grant will fund study of antibiotics in relation to Alzheimer's Disease

Emily Beck (Assistant Professor) was awarded a one-year KUMC-ADRC Developmental Projects Grant from the University of Kansas Alzheimer's Disease Research Center (KU ADRC). The KUMC-ADRC Developmental Projects Grant is a competitive pilot grant program from the University of Kansas Alzheimer's Disease Research Center (KU ADRC) that provides seed funding for novel, pilot studies relevant to Alzheimer's Disease and Related Dementias (ADRD) and brain aging.

 The primary goal of the grant is to study how antibiotics can target evolutionarily shared features of mitochondria and microbes leading to mitochondrial damage cascades. The second goal of the grant is to develop threespine stickleback fish as a model for studying mitochondrial diseases like Alzheimer's Disease (AD). Many models for Alzheimer's Disease lack mitochondrial genomic variation - something common and important in humans but not easily studied in traditional animal models. Stickleback have high levels of mitogenomic variation allowing us to incorporate this important factor into AD studies.