Understanding Molecular Links of Vascular Cognitive Impairment: Selective Interaction between Mutant APP, TP53, and MAPKs

Abstract

Vascular cognitive impairment (VCI) is an understudied cerebrovascular disease. As it can result in a significant amount of functional and cognitive disabilities, it is vital to reveal proteins related to it. Our study focuses on revealing proteins related to this complex disease by deciphering the crosstalk between cardiovascular and cognitive diseases. We build protein-protein interaction networks related to cardiovascular and cognitive diseases. After merging these networks, we analyze the network to extract the hub proteins and their interactors. We found the clusters on this network and built the structural protein-protein interaction network of the most connected cluster on the network. We analyzed the interactions of this network with molecular modeling via PRISM. PRISM predicted several interactions that can be novel in the context of VCI-related interactions. Two mutant forms of APP (V715M and L723P), previously not connected to VCI, were discovered to interact with other proteins. Our findings demonstrate that two mutant forms of APP interact differently with TP53 and MAPK’s. Furthermore, TP53, AKT1, PARP1, and FGFR1 interact with MAPKs through their mutant conformations. We hypothesize that these interactions might be crucial for VCI. We suggest that these interactions and proteins can act as early VCI markers or as possible therapeutic targets.