Affiliation:
1. The Center for Neurodegenerative Disease Research, Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104; and
2. Department of Biology, Molecular Neurobiology, University of Oldenburg, Oldenburg, Germany D-26111
Abstract
Multiple tau gene mutations are pathogenic for hereditary frontotemporal dementia and parkinsonism linked to chromosome 17 (FTDP-17), with filamentous tau aggregates as the major lesions in the CNS of these patients. Recent studies have shown that bacterially expressed recombinant tau proteins with FTDP-17 missense mutations cause functional impairments, i.e., a reduced ability of mutant tau to bind to or promote the assembly of microtubules. To investigate the biological consequences of FTDP-17 tau mutants and assess their ability to form filamentous aggregates, we engineered Chinese hamster ovary cell lines to stably express tau harboring one or several different FTDP-17 mutations and showed that different tau mutants produced distinct pathological phenotypes. For example, ΔK, but not several other single tau mutants (e.g., V337 M, P301L, R406W), developed insoluble amorphous and fibrillar aggregates, whereas a triple tau mutant (VPR) containing V337M, P301L, and R406W substitutions also formed similar aggregates. Furthermore, the aggregates increased in size over time in culture. Significantly, the formation of aggregated ΔK and VPR tau protein correlated with reduced affinity of these mutants to bind microtubules. Reduced phosphorylation and altered proteolysis was also observed in R406W and ΔK tau mutants. Thus, distinct pathological phenotypes, including the formation of insoluble filamentous tau aggregates, result from the expression of different FTDP-17 tau mutants in transfected Chinese hamster ovary cells and implies that these missense mutations cause diverse neurodegenerative FTDP-17 syndromes by multiple mechanisms.
Publisher
American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB)
Subject
Cell Biology,Molecular Biology
Cited by
109 articles.
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