Grant: DRA : Canada Graduate Research Scholarship - Doctoral Program (CGRS D)

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is an inflammatory disease that causes chronic damage to the brain and spinal cord. Damage to nerve cells is what drives long-term disability and disease worsening. Research has shown that the tiny connections between nerve cells, called synapses, are also affected in the brains of people living with MS. Synapses are essential for communication in the brain because they allow nerve cells to send signals that control movement, memory, and cognition. In MS, these connections become disrupted or lost, which contributes to depression, fatigue, and difficulties with learning, memory, and challenges in performing daily activities. However, there are no available therapies for protecting brain function because we do not fully understand how nerve cell connections are lost. Our lab focuses on studying nerve cells, with the goal of addressing this knowledge and therapeutic gap in MS research. We know that a protein called heterogeneous nuclear ribonucleoprotein A1 ('A1') plays an essential role in promoting nerve cell health and connectivity. We have previously shown that these functions of A1 are impaired in brains of people with MS which injures nerve cells and alters other processes important for synapses. We therefore hypothesize that impaired A1 function contributes to MS by disrupting nerve cell connections. Our next steps are to study how A1 affects nerve cell communication in MS experimentally. I will model impaired A1 function by removing A1 from nerve cells in the mouse brain and from nerve cells grown in a dish. Using a powerful microscope and different measures of synapse function, including behaviour studies, I will define how nerve cell connectivity and brain function are disrupted with impaired A1 function in MS. This work is important because it will help us understand how cognitive symptoms occur with disease worsening and provide new avenues for therapies that could protect brain function in persons living with MS.