Zdenek Berger
Neuroscientist who, in David Rubinsztein's lab in Cambridge, showed that rapamycin-induced autophagy lowers the toxicity of several disease proteins that form clumps, including tau in fruit flies
Department of Medical Genetics, Cambridge Institute for Medical Research, Addenbrooke's Hospital, University of Cambridge (at the time of the study, 2006)
Portrait: LinkedIn
Several brain diseases, including Huntington's disease and some dementias, are caused by proteins that misfold and clump together. Autophagy, the cell's self-cleaning system, can remove such clumps, and rapamycin switches autophagy on by blocking mTOR. In BER2006, Zdenek Berger, working in David Rubinsztein's lab in Cambridge, extended the group's earlier huntingtin work. In cultured cells, rapamycin increased the clearance of several proteins with long stretches of the amino acid glutamine, and of a protein with an extended alanine stretch, and reduced their toxicity. In fruit flies carrying normal or mutant human tau, rapamycin lowered tau toxicity and the amount of insoluble tau. The authors proposed that inducing autophagy might help in a range of clumping-protein diseases. The evidence comes from cells and flies only, with no data in mammals or people.
PubMed lists about 14 papers under this name on huntingtin, tau, LRRK2 and alpha-synuclein, the proteins behind Huntington's, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases. No current institutional page was found, so the affiliation shown is the one on the Atlas paper.
Milestones in the Atlas
A selection, not a full bibliography: only papers that meet the Atlas inclusion criteria.
| Year | Evidence | Study |
|---|---|---|
| 2006 | M | Rapamycin alleviates toxicity of different aggregate-prone proteins BER2006 First author: showed that rapamycin speeds the clearance and lowers the toxicity of several aggregate-prone proteins in cells, and of tau in flies. |
Co-authors in the Atlas 4
People with a profile here who share at least one study with Zdenek Berger.
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- Brinda Ravikumar First author of the 2004 study showing that switching off mTOR clears the toxic protein of Huntington disease by autophagy
- Cahir O'Kane Fruit-fly geneticist at Cambridge who studies how the endoplasmic reticulum is built inside nerve fibres and how its failure causes hereditary spastic paraplegia, and who helped bring Drosophila models into David Rubinsztein's autophagy work
- David C. Rubinsztein Showed that rapamycin induces autophagy to clear the toxic protein of Huntington's disease, and that where lysosomes sit inside a cell helps set mTORC1 activity
- Fiona Menzies Cell biologist who worked for many years in David Rubinsztein's Cambridge lab on autophagy and the clearance of disease proteins in neurodegeneration
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