Solving the mysteries of bioscience
Foundational Science Fuels Breakthroughs
Inspiring Next-Generation Scientists
Explore how scientists study Alzheimer’s disease using transcriptomics and immunolabeling
Topic: Neuroscience
Audience: Introductory to intermediate undergraduate students
Open dataset: Seattle Alzheimer’s Disease Brain Cell Atlas (SEA-AD)
Resource type: Lesson
Each lesson contains a student worksheet and an instructor guide.
About this lesson:
This collection of four lessons walks students through how scientists work with donated brain tissue to study how the healthy human brain differs from a brain with Alzheimer’s neuropathology. Throughout these lessons, students are asked to consider both the social and biological contexts of Alzheimer’s disease while looking at data from single brain cells about which genes they are or are not expressing relative to their cellular neighbors in the brain. Students are also guided through an interactive image dataset of immunolabeled brain tissue, allowing students to compare the presence and/or absence of biological hallmarks thought to be associated with Alzheimer’s disease pathology.