A team, led by a BRC researcher, has been awarded almost £200,000 to speed up global research into Parkinson’s.
Parkinson’s UK awarded the grant to Dr Ruth Lovering, from UCL’s Centre for Cardiovascular Genetics, and her team to expand the annotation of the human proteome to genes relevant to Parkinson’s disease and make this data more accessible to researchers around the world.
The team, including international experts, will work together to summarise what is already known about genes linked to Parkinson’s and what they do. The team will convert this detailed genetic information into a special language, similar to shorthand, that can be easily read by a computer.
The gene annotation data will then be added to a wide variety of online scientific databases and uploaded into more than 50 computer-based analysis tools. The team will also create a website, publish scientific papers to journals and attend meetings to share their work with the Parkinson’s research community.
It is not yet fully understood why people develop Parkinson’s. Genes, lifestyle and environmental factors are all thought to be involved. People with Parkinson’s do not have enough of a chemical called dopamine because some nerve cells in their brain have died.
In the last 15 years a range of genetic changes that play a part in Parkinson’s have been identified including very rare mutations that cause the condition directly and other more common changes that slightly increase risk. Understanding how these genetic changes affect the way nerve cells work is providing vital new insights into why the nerve cells die in Parkinson’s, and how it may be possible to protect them.
However, as techniques for analysing genes become more powerful, researchers are uncovering more about the genes involved – creating a huge amount of information that is difficult to navigate.
The team hope this project will bring together the huge and expanding knowledge of the genetics of Parkinson’s and make it accessible free of charge to researchers all over the world.
Dr Lovering said: “I am very excited about leading this project and anticipate that this will help bridge the gap between the existing knowledge about neurological processes and new technologies, such as genome wide association studies, next generation sequencing and mRNA profiling. Consequently, this funding will help advance the understanding of the molecular mechanisms underlying Parkinson’s disease and support the identification of new targets for therapy and biomarkers for diagnosis.”
