Affiliations: Departments of Neurology, Massachusetts General and Brigham and Women's Hospitals, and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
Correspondence:
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Address for correspondence: Vikram Khurana, Department of Neurology, Brigham and Women's Hospitals, 75 Francis Street, MA 02115, USA. E-mail: vkhurana@partners.org.
Abstract: The fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster has emerged as a powerful system in which to model human disease. This review focuses on the utility of the fly to model tau-dependent neurodegeneration, a hallmark of Alzheimer's disease and related neurodegenerative disorders. I provide a detailed description of fly tauopathy models and summarize a number of studies that demonstrate their ability to recapitulate both primary features of tauopathy, including tau-induced neurodegeneration and phosphorylation, and secondary features, including oxidative stress, cell-cycle activation and changes in the actin cytoskeleton. Important genetic and biochemical insights are discussed, and future directions proposed.
