A Plant Small-Molecule Discovery Platform to Study Neurodegeneration

RNA and protein aggregation have been implicated in a variety of neurodegenerative disorders, including ALS and Huntington’s Disease. Similar aggregation has not been observed in plant cells, and studies in plants have found that they contain natural compounds that antagonize pathogenic protein aggregation, making them a potential valuable source for small molecule inhibitors of aggregation. This team will develop a new peptide screening platform using plant cells that are engineered to express human neurodegenerative disease-causing proteins and RNAs, in the hopes of uncovering a new way for screening small-molecule-protein interactions in vivo.

This project was selected for the second phase of the Collaborative Pairs RFA.