Professor Jeetain Mittal receives a new $3.3 million NIH grant, with Brown University

Professor Jeetain Mittal, the Sam and Ruth Madrid Endowed Chair in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering recently received a $3.3 million NIH grant, in collaboration with Brown University, entitled "Functional and pathological  interactions of TDP-43." The grant is part of the NIH R01 grant mechanism and will allow the team to study human TAR DNA binding protein of 43 kDa (TDP-43), which forms intraneuronal aggregates in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and Alzheimer's disease-related dementias. The team will use their combined expertise in experimental and computational structural biology techniques to elucidate the atomistic details of TDP-43 assembly, the role of post-translational modification and disease-associated mutations on the assembly processes, and interactions with several promising therapeutic targets to prevent aggregation.