 I'm Sophie Socoloff, I'm assistant professor at UCLA School of Nursing and a member of the UCLA Center for the Advancement of the Gerontological Nursing Science in the UCLA Brain Research Institute. In this abstract video I'm going to describe the paper that was recently published with my co-worker in cytometry in which we show that it was physically possible to isolate and purify nerve terminal from Alzheimer's disease cortex. We show that actually we were able to resolve nerve terminal that cannot be resolved by light microscopy and to actually purify them and increase the content of their pathological markers such as amyloid beta and p-tow. So we are here at the UCLA Flowport Facility and this is where we did our physical cells story. And the first step of our experiment was to first acquire synaptosome based on their size. So we decided we get it on size standard beads and only collected particles between 0.5 and 1.5 micro. With this method we were able to store 500 million synaptosomes and further investigate the purity of the synaptosome by electron microscopy and we showed that actually our collected sample were a uniform population of synaptosome. So the second step of our experiment was to collect synaptosome based on the amyloid beta immunostaining and to collect particles that were only positive for amyloid beta and they were also of course based on their size. And so after 13 hours of sorting we were able to collect 100 millions of particles and to further characterize the pathology of those purified nerve terminal we did some immunoblotting and we labeled those membrane with an antibody against amyloid beta and we showed that actually there was an enrichment in the amyloid beta aggregate in the purified sample as compared to the non-purified sample. And the next step was to look at the content of p-tel so phosphorylated tel and we also showed an increase in the aggregate of phosphorylated tel in the sorted sample as compared to the crude synaptosome sample. So in the past year with micro workers Karen Gillis we have developed a analytical flow cytometry method to quantify protein in Alzheimer's disease nerve terminal but with this technique with the high speed self-sorting we show that we can actually physically isolate nerve terminal from Alzheimer's cortex but also to purify them and increase their content in the Alzheimer's pathology markers. And as synapses loss are believed to be an early step and correlate with the cognitive decline in AD pathology this method provides a new promising technique to look inside the nerve terminal and to understand what's happening in intact terminal and to better understand the early stage of AD pathology. And this also provides a new method that can further be used for other neurological disorders such as Parkinson's disease to better understand the molecular pathways in Parkinson's disease brain.