Designing thiophene-based fluorescent probes for the study of neurodegenerative protein aggregation diseases : From test tube to in vivo experiments

Protein aggregation is an event related to numerous neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzhemier’s disease and prion diseases. However little is known as to how and why the aggregates form and furthermore, the toxic specie may not be the mature fibril but an on route or off route specie towards mature aggregates. During this project molecular probes were synthesized that may shed some light to these questions. The probes are thiophene based and the technique used for detection was mainly fluorescence. It was shown that the previously established thiophene based in vitro staining technique is valid ex vivo and in vivo. This would not have been possible without the synthesis of a variety of functionalized polymeric thiophene based probes; their in vitro and ex vivo staining properties were taken into consideration when the design of the small oligomeric probes were decided upon. These probes were shown to spectrally distinguish different types of amyloid, pass the bloodbrain barrier within minutes and specifically and selectively stain protein aggregates in the brains of mice