Recent work on Alzheimer's disease transgenics

The most significant feature of the current transgenic models of Alzheimer's disease continues to be the amyloid phenotype. In the past year, mice have been more extensively characterized in terms of the effect of amyloid accumulation on downstream events, such as neurodegeneration and behavioral changes, but the results have been complex. Genetic crosses have shown that apolipoprotein E and TGF-β1 influence the deposition event and that the presenilins act synergistically with the amyloid precursor protein in pathology development. The mice have great utility in amyloid modulation studies but are still not complete models of Alzheimer's disease.