Endoplasmic reticulum dysfunction in Alzheimer's disease.

The endoplasmic reticulum (ER) serves many crucial cellular functions. However, when misfolded or unfolded proteins accumulated in the ER, the stress of ER will be induced. Meanwhile, the intracellular signaling network, which is called unfolded protein response, will also be activated to cope with. Those unfolded proteins can be recognized by three kinds of stress sensors which are IRE1, PERK, and ATF6. Based on lots of medical reports, ER stress in postmortem brains from Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients, animals, and vitro models have indicated that ER dysfunction might work as an important part in causing AD. In this review, we demonstrated that the effect of ER stress contributed to the pathogenesis of AD. ER stress associates almost the whole brain pathology processes which can be observed in AD, such as gene mutation of presenilin1, the abnormal clipped mRNA of presenilin2, β-amyloid production, tau phosphorylation, and cell death. The status of ER stress and unfolded protein response in the pathogenesis of AD also suggests they can be used as potential therapeutic agents.