A new federal grant will help genetics experts in Huntsville who are working to counter a prime driver of Alzheimer’s and related forms of dementia.

Two faculty investigators at the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology have been awarded a five-year, $3.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, HudsonAlpha recently announced.

HudsonAlpha’s Nick Cochran and Rick Myers, along with Danielle Swaney of the University of California San Francisco, will use the grant in their studies of a gene called MAPT that codes for the tau protein, according to a HudsonAlpha news release. Aggregations of tau and other proteins lead to progressive loss of brain cells in many neurodegenerative diseases.