I am immensely grateful to Michel Goedert and @sjorsscheres.bsky.social for their guidance and mentoring and to all the people, who contributed to this work, Sofia Lövestam, @qcxy8886.bsky.social, Benjamin Ryskeldi-Falcon, Jennifer Macdonald, Gabriel Stephenson, Bernardino Ghetti, and Ann McKee.
This improved model is able to detect tau seeds with specificity towards seeds from 3R+4R tauopathies and can be used to further our understanding of the mechanisms involved in seeded aggregation.
We also used electron cryo-microscopy to structurally characterise the AD-seeded tau filaments from the biosensor cells and determined that they are able to reproduce the Alzheimer tau fold.
In our work we rationally designed a new sensitive HEK-based biosensor cell line that is able to specifically detect tau seeds from 3R+4R tauopathies, such as Alzheimer's disease (AD) and Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE).
