Danica Hamlin: Visualising an Alzheimer's Diseased Brain

This image is from the brain of one of the postmortem Alzheimer’s Disease cases I am studying in my PhD. It shows fluorescent labelling of the pathological tau protein. A protein which when dysregulated can cause cognitive impairment and which plays a vital role in many neurodegenerative diseases. Within the image each colour represents the tau protein at a different stage of maturity as my research looks at how the tau protein matures and changes in relation to progressive disease states. Immature versions of the tau protein are in green and pink, while more mature pathological protein aggregates are shown in red and yellow (often these markers overlap and appear orange). Note that the blue dots are cell nuclei. This work has helped provide a more accurate and efficient framework for studying the progression of tau aggregation and maturation in disease.