Advancement in Analytical Techniques for Determining the Activity of β-Site Amyloid Precursor Protein Cleaving Enzyme 1

Abstract

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a degenerative disease of the central nervous system. The pathogenesis is still not fully clear. One of the main histopathological manifestations is senile plaques formed by β-amyloid (Aβ) accumulation. Aβ is generated from the sequential proteolysis of amyloid precursor protein (APP) by β-secretase [i.e. β-site APP cleaving enzyme 1 (BACE1)] and γ-secretase, with a rate-limiting step controlled by BACE1 activity. Therefore, inhibiting BACE1 activity has become a potential therapeutic strategy for AD. The development of reliable detection methods for BACE1 activity plays an important role in early diagnosis of AD and evaluation of the therapeutic effect of new drugs for AD. This article has reviewed the recent advances in BACE1 activity detection techniques. The challenges of applying these analysis techniques to early clinical diagnosis of AD and development trends of the detection techniques have been prospected.

Keywords:

• Alzheimer’s disease
• BACE1 activity
• analytical techniques
• biosensors

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interest or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 22074089 and 21505091).