Grant: Doctoral Award - Frederick Banting and Charles Best Canada Graduate Scholarships

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a degenerative brain disorder that affects over six million individuals worldwide. It leads to deficits in movement and cognition that significantly reduce quality of life. Approximately 10% of Parkinson cases have a known genetic cause, but elements explaining the remaining 90% of cases are not fully understood. However, certain lifestyle factors such as stress, diet, pesticide exposure, and exercise have been associated with increased or decreased rates of PD. These factors can alter how genes are regulated, and might help explain why PD develops in some individuals but not others. My project will investigate how pesticides, high fat diet, and stress affect gene regulation in healthy individuals and whether each environment may increase risk of PD. I will also explore whether exercise could prevent PD in individuals that have a known genetic risk for it. To understand how these environments affect the brain, I will use human neurons and brains of mice, that are either healthy or have PD genetic risk. To discover whether we can detect markers of PD before diagnosis, I will also look at blood samples from early-stage PD patients. With information on which patients were exposed to pesticides and how much each person smoked and drank alcohol, I will explore whether indicators of PD are specific to certain lifestyles. This work will enhance our understanding of how disease develops and why it affects some individuals more than others, ultimately leading to identification of early indicators of PD, novel therapeutic targets, and lifestyle prevention strategies.