CNR-PAN Bilateral Project

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Title: CNR-PAN (Poland) bilateral project – The role of copper ions in neurodegeneration: molecular models.

Principal Investigator at ICCOM: Giovanni La Penna

Project type: International

Duration: 01/2017-31/03/2020

Abstract: The project stems from a previoius bilateral project that produced in vitro experiments and molecular models that demonstrated the activation of dioxygen to superoxide exerted by Cu-Abeta dimeric complexes. This collaboration between the laboratory in Firenze and the computational group of Mai Suan Li in Warsaw (PL) describes in detail the effect of Cu-Abeta binding on the solubility of the peptide, showing that the 1:1 Cu:Abeta ratio provides an efficient mechanism to the diffusion of toxic species between neurons. This bilateral project combines modeling techniques and human resources of two modeling units, increasing the size and statistics of the models, thus attracting more interest by biologists and physicians. The european-scale modeling unit will constitute a seed for the development of an european project devoted to early diagnosis of neurodegeneration by addressing low traces of biologically released redox-active ions as the target biomarkers.

ICCOM participants: Giovanni La Penna, Susanna Monti.

Partnership: ICCOM, Institute of Physics of the Polish Academy of Science (PAN, Poland), Prof. Mai Suan Li.