Paul D. Coleman, Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus of Neurobiology and Anatomy
Ph.D. 1953, University of Rochester

Research: Neurobiology of Aging and Alzheimer's Disease; Profiling expressions of multiple messages from single defined neurons in human and animal brains.

The study of molecular biology of the brain has been limited by methods that take sizeable pieces of tissue, grind them up and perform biological studies. However, we know that within any, even very small sample of tissue are cells of many different types, and in the case of neurodegenerative disease, in many different stages of disease progression. These facts argued for examining single cells in aging and neurodegenerative disease. To do this we use methods of immunochemistry, insitu hybridization, and combinations of these two. In addition, we have recently developed methods for extracting messenger RNA from single identified cells, amplifying this message a million fold and determining the levels of expression of multiple genes from each single cell. The resulting masses of data are analyzed using advanced methods of multi-variate statistics and bio-informatics. Studies using these methods have demonstrated the re-expression of some cell cycle genes in neurons from the Alzheimer's diseased brain.