Transcriptomic analysis unveils bona fide molecular signatures of microglia under conditions of homeostasis and viral encephalitis.

ABSTRACT: Microglia serve as a front-line defense against neuroinvasive viral infection, however, determination of their actual transcriptional profiles under conditions of health and disease is challenging. Here, we used various experimental approaches to delineate the transcriptional landscape of microglia during viral infection. Intriguingly, multiple activation genes were found to be artificially induced in sorted microglia and we demonstrated that shear stress encountered during cell sorting was one of the key inducers. Post-hoc analysis revealed that publicly available large-scale single-cell RNA sequencing datasets were significantly tainted by aberrant signatures that are associated with cell sorting. By exploiting the ribosomal tagging approach, we developed a strategy to enrich microglia-s

SUBMITTER: Mulenge F 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11330067 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature