Tau Abnormalities and the Potential Therapy in Alzheimer's Disease

Abstract

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is one of the most prevalent neurodegenerative diseases that is characterized by progressive memory loss and two main pathological hallmarks, including the extracellular amyloid plaques and intracellular neurofibrillary tangles. The microtubule-related protein tau is involved in the pathogenesis of many neurological diseases commonly known as tauopathies and is found to be abnormally hyperphosphorylated in AD and accumulated in neurons. Besides hyperphosphorylation, tau also undergoes abnormal glycosylation, ubiquitination, glycation, and other posttranslational modifications. These abnormalities lead to the aberrant aggregation of tau in the synaptic loci in AD. In this review, we highlighted the most recent studies about how tau is abnormally regulated and how those abnormalities play important roles in the pathogenesis of AD.

Keywords: Aggregation; Alzheimer’s disease; hyperphosphorylation; post-translational modifications; tau.