Susanne Klingenberg

About me

Susanne Klingenberg
PhD-student
klingens@uni-mainz.de
Phone:+49 (0)6131 39 27144
Anselm-Franz-von-Bentzel-Weg 3, 55128 Mainz

Current project

Common & Unique Factors in Neurodegeneration

Neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease (AD), Parkinson’s disease (PD), Huntington’s disease (HD), and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) are heterogeneous, progressive diseases with frequently overlapping symptoms characterized by a loss of neurons. Studies have suggested relations between neurodegenerative diseases (NDDs) for many years, thus we gathered publicly available genomic, transcriptomic, and proteomic data from 177 studies and more than one million patients to detect shared genetic patterns between the neurodegenerative diseases on these three omics-layers. Our meta-study reveals highly significant processes in the found set of 139 genes, common to all analyzed NDDs and might therefore contribute to the development of pharmaceutical measures against neurodegeneration in general. Regarding future research on this topic, we want to expand the repertoire of omics-layers by epigenomics and concentrate further on the differences between these separate NDDs according to the regulation of their common genes. Additional analyses of the overlaps between different omics layers at the level of individual diseases, as well as differences in the intersection of AD, PD, and ALS in contrast with the autosomal dominant disorder HD, could also provide new insight in light of the knowledge of the processes common to all NDDs.

Publications