This town talk will be presented by Lukasz Joachimiak, Associate Professor, UT Southwestern Medical Center.

Tau is a protein in brain cells that normally helps support their internal structure. In more than 25 brain diseases, including Alzheimer’s, tau can misfold and clump together into harmful fibers. Recent advances in imaging have shown that these tau clumps can take on many different shapes depending on the disease, but it is still unclear how the same protein can form such a wide variety of structures. In this talk, I will describe how we are using both experiments and computational methods to understand the basic rules that guide how tau changes shape and forms these toxic aggregates. By uncovering these rules, we hope to develop better ways to detect specific forms of tau early and design targeted treatments that can stop or prevent these diseases.