Ph.D. Projects


Proteomics study of the protein pattern changes in cerebrospinal fluid of neurodegenerative diseases
The major challenge in conducting a proteomics analysis of central nervous system (CNS) pathologies is to obtain appropriate samples. The cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) being in contact with the brain contains proteins released directly from the CNS, and is routinely available. For these reasons CSF analysis is important to understand the pathological processes involved in diseases, and for diagnostic purpose. We successfully applied differential expression proteomics analysis to human CSF of patients with traumatic brain injury and patients with peripheral neuropathies.

This project is aimed to:

  1. perform differential expression protein analysis on CSF from Parkinson’s Disease (PD), Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) and Multiple Sclerosis (MS) patients, in order to identify molecules affected by the pathologies (by 2D-electrophoresis and mass spectrometry analysis);

  2. investigate the involvement  in the pathological mechanisms of the proteins identified in 1 (by cell biology, biochemistry and molecular biology depending on the nature of the identified proteins);

  3. correlation analysis of the identified putative biomarker/s with patients stage for patients stratification;

  4. define functional networks of the differentially expressed proteins that may highlight altered pathways (by computational approach for complex systems analysis, already develop in the lab).