Compromised Plasma Membrane Repair Contributes to Neuronal Cell Death and Neurodegeneration During Alzheimer’s Disease

Abstract

Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is the most common neurodegenerative disease and involves accumulation of intracellular amyloid beta (Aβ) in the early stages of the disease. Aβ has been shown to compromise neuronal cell membrane integrity by increasing membrane permeability, elevating intracellular calcium concentrations, and Aβ directly penetrating and damaging the neuronal cell membrane. Damage to the cell membrane requires a rapid and effcient repair mechanism to restore the barrier function of the membrane and avoid cell death. Here, we aimed to study the effects of intracellular Aβ on neuronal cell membrane repair. To determine if membrane permeability is compromised in vivo, we stained 6-month FVB and APP/PS1 brain sections with anti-IgG. We observed a significant increase in IgG positivity in the APP/PS1 tissue as compared to the FVB brains. We repeated this with post-mortem frontal lobe tissue and observed a significant increase in IgG-positivity in the AD samples as compared to the non-AD. To assess the effect of neuronal membrane repair in AD patients, we treated mouse neuroblastomas (N2A) and primary mouse hippocampal neurons with non-AD and AD patient cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) at a 1:100 dilution or 1μM recombinant human Aβ42. We conducted laser damage assays and observed a membrane repair defect in these neuronal cell models. We explored the biochemical components of the CSF that may be contributing to this induced repair defect, we measured the Aβ42 by ELISA and stratified Aβ42 concentration by the corresponding CSF AUC. We observed a positive correlation between Aβ42 concentrations and reduced membrane repair capacity. We sought to determine the mechanism of the reduced membrane repair capacity by assessing the expression levels of membrane repair proteins and observed decreased dysferlin in cell models, 6-month APP/PS1 mouse models, and human postmortem tissues with high levels of Aβ. Overexpression of dysferlin in the AD cell models can increase dysferlin expression and restore membrane repair capacity in neurons treated with AD CSF samples or recombinant Aβ42. We have determined this reduction in repair capacity is due to reduced dysferlin expression, and future studies will determine the mechanism leading to dysferlin downregulation. This work was supported by The Ohio State University College of Medicine Dean’s Discovery Grants Program. This is the full abstract presented at the American Physiology Summit 2024 meeting and is only available in HTML format. There are no additional versions or additional content available for this abstract. Physiology was not involved in the peer review process.