{"id":224211,"date":"2025-10-29T14:04:25","date_gmt":"2025-10-29T19:04:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/10\/fruit-flies-offer-new-insights-into-how-alzheimers-disease-risk-genes-affect-the-brain"},"modified":"2025-10-29T14:04:25","modified_gmt":"2025-10-29T19:04:25","slug":"fruit-flies-offer-new-insights-into-how-alzheimers-disease-risk-genes-affect-the-brain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/10\/fruit-flies-offer-new-insights-into-how-alzheimers-disease-risk-genes-affect-the-brain","title":{"rendered":"Fruit flies offer new insights into how Alzheimer\u2019s disease risk genes affect the brain"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/fruit-flies-offer-new-insights-into-how-alzheimers-disease-risk-genes-affect-the-brain.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Scientists have identified hundreds of genes that may increase the risk of developing Alzheimer\u2019s disease but the roles these genes play in the brain are poorly understood. This lack of understanding poses a barrier to developing new therapies, but in a study <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cell.com\/ajhg\/fulltext\/S0002-9297(25)00394-5\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> in the <i>American Journal of Human Genetics<\/i>, researchers at Baylor College of Medicine and the Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute (Duncan NRI) at Texas Children\u2019s Hospital offer new insights into how Alzheimer\u2019s disease risk genes affect the brain.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe studied fruit fly versions of 100 human Alzheimer\u2019s disease risk genes,\u201d said first author Dr. Jennifer Deger, a neuroscience graduate in Baylor\u2019s Medical Scientist Training Program (M.D.\/Ph. D.), mentored by Drs. Joshua Shulman and Hugo Bellen.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe developed fruit flies with mutations that \u2018turned off\u2019 each gene and determined how this affected the fly\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/medicalxpress.com\/tags\/brain\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">brain<\/a> structure, function and stress resilience as the flies aged.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Scientists have identified hundreds of genes that may increase the risk of developing Alzheimer\u2019s disease but the roles these genes play in the brain are poorly understood. This lack of understanding poses a barrier to developing new therapies, but in a study published in the American Journal of Human Genetics, researchers at Baylor College of [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,412,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-224211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-genetics","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224211","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=224211"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224211\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=224211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=224211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=224211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}