Section: Application Domains

Protein polymerisation

Protein polymerisation is the key feature of amyloid diseases, among which we can quote Alzheimer's, Prion (in particular variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, epidemically linked to bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or so-called “mad cow”, disease), Parkinson's, Huntington's diseases. However, the mechanisms of polymerisation are far from being quantitatively understood by biologists. They can be modelled with the help of coagulation-fragmentation equations, a field of expertise of MAMBA [51] , [50] . Hence the European starting grant SKIPPER${}^{AD},$ which follows the ANR project TOPPAZ, came up very naturally from the encounter with Human Rezaei, a biologist expert in amyloid diseases at INRA Jouy-en-Josas. Moreover, this field of applications brings new questions to us, which is both a stimulation for our mathematical research and a very promising tool for the biologists.