Rebecca Wallings, Laura Hughes, Hannah A. Staley, Zachary D. Simon, Nikolaus R. McFarland, Roy Alcalay, Alicia A. Garrido, Maria Jose Marti,Eduardo T. Sarró, Nicolas Dzamko and Malu G. Tansey, “WHOPPA enables parallel assessment of LRRK2 and GCase enzymatic activity in Parkinson’s disease monocytes” Frontiers in Cellular Neuroscience (2022),
Laura Hughes, a PhD student in Nicolas Dzamko’s lab group, in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Florida has recently had a co-first author paper accepted in Frontiers in Cellular Neuroscience. This study sought to optimise a peripheral blood mononuclear cell (PBMC) collection and processing protocol and flow cytometry workflow, which was named the “Wallings-Hughes Optimised Protocol for PBMC Assessment (WHOPPA)”. Strong correlations between the two laboratories support a role for the global use of WHOPPA and the flow cytometry workflow to examine expression and activity levels of PD-associated proteins in PBMCs, with the ultimate goal of finding reliable and reproducible biomarkers in larger cohorts of subjects with Parkinson’s disease.