Dr. Tamgüney is interested in chronic wasting disease (CWD), an extremely transmissible prion disease of deer and elk. He employs transgenesis to elucidate the mechanism of CWD transmission and to identify residues within the prion protein that influence interspecies prion transmission.
Furthermore, he is interested in the molecular mechanism of prion induced neurodegeneration and also seeks to identify genes that modulate incubation times in prion disease using transgenic and knockout mice.
