Graduation Year
2018
Date of Submission
5-2018
Document Type
Open Access Senior Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts
Department
Neuroscience
Reader 1
Jenna Monroy
Reader 2
Thomas Borowski
Terms of Use & License Information
Abstract
Individuals in modern Western societies are experiencing increasing sedentary lifestyles, overindulgence of high fat, high-sugar diets, and extremely sterilized conditions, putting immense pressure on researchers and clinicians alike to come up with viable treatments for conditions implicated with an aging society. Emerging research have published the benefits of IMS and metabolic switching in a variety of neuroprotective, cellular stress resistance, and neuroplasticity pathways in animal models and clinical results from randomized trials of IMS regimens with susceptible human populations are soon to be published. The application of genome editing and next-generation sequencing (NGS) strategies to clinical and neurodegenerative research continues to elucidate the relationship between a patient’s specific genetic background and modern environmental stressors towards disease pathology. This study attempts to utilize novel CRISPR/Cas9 strategies to introduce targeted gene edits and explores the role of reduced ketone-body synthesis/metabolism with 3-hydroxymethyl-3-methylglutaryl-CoA lyase HMGCL KO, in the therapeutic and neuroprotective potential of intermittent metabolic switching in 3xTg mice, genetically predisposed for Alzheimer pathology. IMS-mediated attenuation of hippocampal spatial memory deficits was confirmed in 5-month-old 3xTg mice using Morris Water Maze and Aβ1-40, Aβ1-42, total tau and p-tau levels were calculated accordingly. Mice receiving time-restricted feeding (TRF) and caloric restriction (CR) regardless of KO performed better in the hippocampal-dependent spatial memory test and ELISA analysis of CSF revealed reduced p-tau levels of 3xTg WT TRF + CR mice relative to WT control or the two experimental groups. Overall, genetic modifications of key metabolic enzymes highlight the variable therapeutic results of the glucose to ketone metabolic switch on cognitive deficits depending on an organism’s genetic background.
Recommended Citation
Kil, Eric Joon Bum, "CRISPR-Cas9 mediated HMGCL KO in 3xTg AD mice reduces the cognitive deficit improvement seen in an intermittent metabolic switching regimen" (2018). CMC Senior Theses. 1832.
https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/1832
