Decoding Age-Related Proteostasis Decline: Cell-Specific BONCAT Labeling and Isolation of Neural Components Using the MA900 Cell Sorter

Age is the single greatest risk factor for neurodegenerative disease, yet the cellular mechanisms that drive age-related protein accumulation in the brain remain incompletely understood. In this webinar, Dr. Ian Guldner presents groundbreaking work published in Nature demonstrating how a novel protein labeling strategy reveals age-associated slowing of neuronal protein degradation and accumulation of synaptic proteins within microglia. Using engineered in vivo models to label nascent neuronal proteomes, Dr. Guldner and colleagues tracked protein turnover, aggregation, and intercellular transfer across brain regions. High-precision cell sorting enabled enrichment of microglia despite tissue complexity and heterogeneity and supported proteomic analyses that revealed the aged neuronal “aggregome” and region-specific vulnerabilities in protein homeostasis.

Key Learning Objectives

• Understand how BONCAT (Bioorthogonal Non-Canonical Amino Acid Tagging) enables cell-type–specific labeling of nascent proteomes in vivo
• Explore how microglia accumulate slow-degrading synaptic proteins during aging
• Examine the technical challenges of isolating proteins from specific neural populations and subcomponents
• Discover how optimized cell sorting workflows improve enrichment, purity, and downstream proteomic analysis in complex brain tissue

Who Should Attend

This webinar is ideal for researchers studying aging, neurodegeneration, or synaptic biology, and those working with complex or fragile tissue samples requiring high-precision sorting. Core facility managers supporting neural tissue dissociation and isolation workflows also will benefit.