Tianshun Lian

This paper describes using Drosophila wing discs to study Tau-mediated disease mechanisms and screen for neuroprotective drugs, showing that human Tau causes cell death and that NAP reduces toxicity.

The paper assesses nine MECP2 variants in ASD using yeast and Drosophila assays, finding four as loss of function and five as functional, highlighting non-methyl DNA-binding roles.

This study shows that Tau aggregation, not phosphorylation, is critical for neurotoxicity in Drosophila, suggesting that targeting aggregation may be more effective than targeting phosphorylation in tauopathies.

The paper uses Drosophila to functionally assess human EED variants, showing that pathogenic variants cause loss of function while benign variants function normally.