Neuronal vulnerability and multilineage diversity in multiple sclerosis
Document Type
Journal ArticlePublication Date
2019-07-17Keywords
Multiple sclerosisNeuroimmunology
Immune System Diseases
Immunopathology
Nervous System
Nervous System Diseases
Neuroscience and Neurobiology
Nucleic Acids, Nucleotides, and Nucleosides
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a neuroinflammatory disease with a relapsing-remitting disease course at early stages, distinct lesion characteristics in cortical grey versus subcortical white matter and neurodegeneration at chronic stages. Here we used single-nucleus RNA sequencing to assess changes in expression in multiple cell lineages in MS lesions and validated the results using multiplex in situ hybridization. We found selective vulnerability and loss of excitatory CUX2-expressing projection neurons in upper-cortical layers underlying meningeal inflammation; such MS neuron populations exhibited upregulation of stress pathway genes and long non-coding RNAs. Signatures of stressed oligodendrocytes, reactive astrocytes and activated microglia mapped most strongly to the rim of MS plaques. Notably, single-nucleus RNA sequencing identified phagocytosing microglia and/or macrophages by their ingestion and perinuclear import of myelin transcripts, confirmed by functional mouse and human culture assays. Our findings indicate lineage- and region-specific transcriptomic changes associated with selective cortical neuron damage and glial activation contributing to progression of MS lesions.Source
Nature. 2019 Jul 17. doi: 10.1038/s41586-019-1404-z. [Epub ahead of print] Link to article on publisher's site
DOI
10.1038/s41586-019-1404-zPermanent Link to this Item
http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14038/37973PubMed ID
31316211Notes
Full author list omitted for brevity. For the full list of authors, see article.
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10.1038/s41586-019-1404-z