Intracellular Tau protein accumulation and spreading in the brain contribute to neurodegeneration and cognitive impairments in Alzheimer’s disease (AD). However, the mechanisms governing tau spreading are not fully elucidated. Here, Montal et al. analyzed tau-PET in two cohorts of cognitively normal elderly participants and first established the tau-PET network across cortical areas in the aging brain. Correlating the network with transcriptomic data, the authors identified several genes associated with tau spreading. Among these, APOE and SLC1A2 were shown to be critical in determining tau spreading. The results suggest that studying the expression of these key genes is likely to be important for understanding tau accumulation and spreading in AD.
