Investigating the role of TMEM106b genetics and pathology in Alzheimer’s disease, LATE and FTLD

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PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT Filaments derived from transmembrane protein 106B (TMEM106B) were recently discovered to represent a novel pathological hallmark in a range of neurodegenerative disorders, including TDP-43 proteinopathies, synucleinopathies, and tauopathies. Notably, TMEM106B genetic variants are linked to risk of frontotemporal lobar degeneration with TDP-43 inclusions (FTLD-TDP), particularly cases with progranulin (GRN) and chromosome 9 open reading frame 72 (C9ORF72) mutations, and limbic-predominant age-related TDP-43 encephalopathy (LATE) neuropathologic change. TMEM106B variants also associate with cognitive decline in patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. While several single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in TMEM106B have been identified and linked to disease risk, only one (rs3173615) introduces a coding change (p.T185S) and it is in high linkage disequilibrium with other risk SNPs. To investigate the intriguing idea that rs3173615 could modulate disease risk through regulation of TMEM106B deposition, we developed an antibody against the TMEM106B filament core sequence. Consistent with recent reports, we detected TMEM106B-positive filaments in the sarkosyl-insoluble fraction from FTLD-TDP and LATE patients. Remarkably, we also observed increased accumulation of insoluble TMEM106B in FTLD-TDP patients homozygous for the rs3173615 risk allele (encoding threonine at residue 185 instead of serine). Collectively, these findings support the hypothesis that TMEM106B aggregation explains the link between genetic variation at the TMEM106B locus and disease risk – and we suspect that it could also explain potential links between rs3173615, TDP-43 proteinopathy, and cognitive decline. We also speculate that differences in TMEM106B accumulation contribute to clinical and pathologic heterogeneity in both FTLD and LATE. Moreover, given that LATE is associated with greater hypometabolism on [18F] fluorodeoxyglucose PET (FDG-PET) in the frontal lobe, a region populated by TMEM106B fibrils, we predict that rs3173615 genotype will also associate with neuroimaging measures of neurodegeneration. In this project, we will investigate the impact of rs3173615 genotype on TMEM106B aggregation and assess whether it associates with TDP-43 proteinopathy and clinical outcomes. We will also explore the mechanism by which the rs3173615 coding variant affects TMEM106B fibril formation, as well as the potential functional consequences of TMEM106B genetic variation and fibril accumulation. Our approach to the latter will be two-fold: as a candidate-based approach, we will determine whether TMEM106B genetic variants impact lysosomal function in neurons, and as an unbiased approach, we will use proteomic analyses to build protein-protein interaction and co-aggregation networks from the soluble and insoluble fractions of patient brains, focusing on differences observed in carriers of the T185 allele versus carriers of the S185 protective genotype.