Project description:The quality of maternal care in early-life plays a crucial role in mammalian neurodevelopment. Augmented maternal care (AMC) is a well-established rodent model of enhanced neonatal care. Rats that have undergone AMC have improved stress resilience and cognition compared with rats that have experienced normal levels of maternal care or adverse neonatal stress. However, the epigenomic basis of long-lived responses to AMC has not been previously explored. Thus, we employed whole-genome bisulfite sequencing (WGBS), RNA-sequencing (RNA-seq), and a multiplex microRNA (miRNA) assay to assess DNA cytosine methylation, gene expression, and miRNA expression, respectively. The integrated results identify a suite of 20 prioritized candidates impacted by AMC. Overall, these results identified AMC-induced regulatory differences in genes related to neurotransmission, neurodevelopment, protein synthesis, and oxidative phosphorylation in addition to the expected stress response genes. Together, these unbiased results represent a key progression in understanding the complex mechanisms underlying the early-life mechanisms for AMC programming stress resiliency.
Project description:The quality of maternal care in early-life plays a crucial role in mammalian neurodevelopment. Augmented maternal care (AMC) is a well-established rodent model of enhanced neonatal care. Rats that have undergone AMC have improved stress resilience and cognition compared with rats that have experienced normal levels of maternal care or adverse neonatal stress. However, the epigenomic basis of long-lived responses to AMC has not been previously explored. Thus, we employed whole-genome bisulfite sequencing (WGBS), RNA-sequencing (RNA-seq), and a multiplex microRNA (miRNA) assay to assess DNA cytosine methylation, gene expression, and miRNA expression, respectively. The integrated results identify a suite of 20 prioritized candidates impacted by AMC. Overall, these results identified AMC-induced regulatory differences in genes related to neurotransmission, neurodevelopment, protein synthesis, and oxidative phosphorylation in addition to the expected stress response genes. Together, these unbiased results represent a key progression in understanding the complex mechanisms underlying the early-life mechanisms for AMC programming stress resiliency.
Project description:The quality of maternal care in early-life plays a crucial role in mammalian neurodevelopment. Augmented maternal care (AMC) is a well-established rodent model of enhanced neonatal care. Rats that have undergone AMC have improved stress resilience and cognition compared with rats that have experienced normal levels of maternal care or adverse neonatal stress. However, the epigenomic basis of long-lived responses to AMC has not been previously explored. Thus, we employed whole-genome bisulfite sequencing (WGBS), RNA-sequencing (RNA-seq), and a multiplex microRNA (miRNA) assay to assess DNA cytosine methylation, gene expression, and miRNA expression, respectively. The integrated results identify a suite of 20 prioritized candidates impacted by AMC. Overall, these results identified AMC-induced regulatory differences in genes related to neurotransmission, neurodevelopment, protein synthesis, and oxidative phosphorylation in addition to the expected stress response genes. Together, these unbiased results represent a key progression in understanding the complex mechanisms underlying the early-life mechanisms for AMC programming stress resiliency.
Project description:Knee osteoarthritis (KOA), as a degenerative multifactorial disease, affects the quality of life and mental health of patients, and also brings a huge socioeconomic burden. Treating synovitis have shown promise as anti-inflammatory therapeutics in mitigating OA symptoms and disease progression. Here, by analysing synovial single-cell sequencing (scRNA-seq) data from KOA, we found that synovial fibroblasts (FLS) in OA synovium showed a distinct pro-inflammatory phenotype. We collected synovial tissue from patients with clinical OA as well as from healthy donors, and histological examination was consistent with findings in scRNA-seq. Inspired by recent cross-tissue fibroblast lineage studies, we identified by sequencing that healthy FLS in synovial tissues share transcriptome-level similarities with dermal fibroblasts (DFb). Subsequently, we revealed the local as well as systemic distribution of intra-articular injected DFbs by constructing/extracting two types of rat fibroblasts (luciferase DFbs as well as GFP DFbs). The results demonstrate that DFbs can be locally retained in the synovium for up to three weeks following targeted engrafting on it. And intra-articular injection does not result in DFbs migration to vital organs or the occurrence of histological changes in these organs. A rat model of KOA was constructed by anterior cruciate ligament transection (ACLT) in order to study the therapeutic effect of DFbs on KOA. After injection, the rats showed improvement in painful gait. In addition, histological as well as imaging results showed reduced synovitis and improvement in articular cartilage. Finally we verified the protective effect of DFbs on cytokine-stimulated chondrocytes in a co-culture system.