Project description:Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a prevalent neurodegenerative disorder where recent evidence suggests pathogenesis may be mediated by inflammatory processes. The molecular architecture of the disease remains to be fully elucidated. We performed single-nucleus transcriptomics and unbiased proteomics using postmortem tissue obtained from the prefrontal cortex of 12 individuals with late-stage PD and age-matched controls. We analyzed ~80,000 nuclei and identified eight major cell types, including brain-resident T cells, each with distinct transcriptional changes in line with the known genetics of PD. By analyzing Lewy body pathology in the same postmortem tissue, we found that α-synuclein pathology is inversely correlated with chaperone expression in excitatory neurons. Examining cell-cell interactions, we found a selective abatement of neuron-astrocyte interactions and enhanced neuroinflammation. Proteomic analyses of the same brains identified synaptic proteins in prefrontal cortex that were preferentially downregulated in PD. Strikingly, comparing this dataset to a regionally similar published analysis for Alzheimer’s disease (AD), we found no common differentially expressed genes in neurons, but identified many shared differentially expressed genes in glial cells, suggesting that disease etiology in PD and AD are likely distinct. These data are presented as a resource for interrogating the molecular and cellular basis of PD and other neurodegenerative diseases.
Project description:We have used microarrays to analyze gene expression in Parkinson’s disease (PD). We used four different brain regions, including two that are relatively affected in PD (striatum and cortex) and two that are relatively spared (cerebellum and medulla). We show that while differences between brain regions are strong, expression profile differences between PD and controls are much more modest and that genome-wide significant differences are restricted to the striatum and cerebral cortex. RNA (aRNA) was generated from 500ng of total RNA from the medulla (n=15 control brains, n=14 PD brains), striatum (n=15 control brains, n = 15 PD brains), frontal cortex (n=15 control brains, n = 11 PD brains) and cerebellum (n = 14 control brains, n=15 PD brains).
Project description:Analysis of substantia nigra from postmortem brains of 4 patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD). Results provide insight into the molecular processes perturbed in the PD substantia nigra.
Project description:Despite the advance of genetic and genomic analysis of Parkinson’s disease (PD), our understanding of PD pathophysiology remains limited due to unclear etiology of idiopathic PD and unavailable integrated approach for large-scale multi-dimensional data. Herein we report a novel multiscale network approach to establish transcriptomic network from postmortem PD brain data. The analysis delineates structures of gene-gene regulatory networks in PD and identifies novel network regulators that are functionally connected to previously identified PD risk genes. We identify STMN2, encoding a neuron-specific stathmin family protein and down-regulated in PD brains, as the top regulator of the transcriptomic network underlying PD. Knock-down of Stmn2 in mice validates its regulatory role, and Stmn2 deficient mice show dopaminergic neuron vulnerability, phosphorylated a-synuclein elevation, and locomotor function deficits. As predicted from the network analysis, reduced STMN2 expression impairs synaptic vesicle trafficking in midbrain neurons. Our approach sheds light on the complexity of PD pathogenic network and thus facilitates identification of novel PD therapeutic targets.
Project description:Analysis of human dopamine (DA) from postmortem brains of 8 patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD). Results provide insight into the molecular processes perturbed in the PD substantia nigra.
Project description:Analysis of human dopamine (DA) from postmortem brains of 8 patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD). Results provide insight into the molecular processes perturbed in the PD substantia nigra. Human dopamine (DA) neurons from 8 PD and 9 control subjects were obtained. Double-stranded complementary DNA was made with a biotinylated T7(dT)-24 primer. Biotinylated complementary RNA was fragmented and hybridized to Affymetrix human genome U133_X3P microarrays. The Affymetrix .CEL files were normalized to “all probe sets” in a standardized matter, and scaled to 100 by the MAS5 algorithm implemented in the Bioconductor package.
Project description:Althougha-synuclein is implicated in the pathogenesis of Parkinson’s disease and related disorders, it remains unclear whether specific conformations or levels ofa-synuclein assemblies are toxic and how they cause progressive loss of human dopaminergic neurons. To address this issue, we used iPSC-derived dopaminergic neurons with a-synuclein triplication or controls where endogenous a-synuclein was imprinted into synthetic or disease-relevant conformations. We used a-synuclein fibrils generated de novo or amplified from homogenates of brains affected with Parkinson’s disease (n=3) or multiple system atrophy (n=5). We found that a 2.5-fold increase in a-synuclein levels in a-synuclein gene triplication neurons promoted seeded aggregation in a dose and time-dependent fashion, which was associated with a further increase in a-synuclein gene expression. Progressive neuronal loss was observed only in a-synuclein triplication neurons seeded with brain-amplified fibrils. Transcriptomic analysis and isogenic correction of a-synuclein triplication revealed that intraneuronalalpha-synuclein levels solely and sufficiently explained vulnerability to neuronal death