Cologne Seminars on Ageing "Increasing importance of selective autophagy and adaptation in neurodegeneration"

  • Date: Oct 5, 2023
  • Time: 01:00 PM - 02:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Christian Behl
  • (GER)
  • Host: Natalia Kononenko (CECAD)
Cologne Seminars on Ageing "Increasing importance of selective autophagy and adaptation in neurodegeneration"

About Dr. Behl´s talk:
In this talk the long and arduous effort to understand neurodegeneration with a particular focus on Alzheimer's Disease will be addressed. It will be displayed which Alzheimer's hypotheses were developed over the decades, which one dominated and which ones were lost. In the need for a widening of the research efforts aiming for an effective prevention and therapy or a future cure, additional pathways and their mechanistic link to neurodegeneration need to be studied in more detail. Such new leads may include autophagy pathways, in particular aggrephagy driven by the HSP70 co-chaperone BAG3, but may also result from looking into the adaptability and the development of resistance of neuronal cells against disease-relevant challenges, such as oxidative and ER-stress.

Scientific Background:
Christian Behl, PhD, is Director of the Institute of Pathobiochemistry at the University Medical Center of the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany, where he is Full Professor and Chair since 2002. Dr. Behl holds a Diploma in Biology from the University of Würzburg, Germany, where he also received his PhD in Neurobiology 1991. Following his postdoc research on Alzheimer's Disease from 1992 to 1994 at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, USA, he headed an Independent Research Group on aging and neurodegeneration at the Max-Planck-Institute for Psychiatry in Munich from 1994-2002. In Mainz, Dr. Behl has translated his long-standing interest in neurodegenerative diseases into a research focus on autophagy, proteostasis, and oxidative stress in the context of age-related neurodegeneration. One of his key research goals is to uncover molecular mechanisms that allow neurons to resist challenges occurring during neurodegenerative diseases.
Christian Behl is Vice-Speaker of the CRC 1177 on "Selective Autophagy" (Speaker: Ivan Dikic)

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