Astrocyte molecular signatures in Huntington's disease

Blanca Diaz-Castro, Mohitkumar R Gangwani, Xinzhu Yu, Giovanni Coppola, Baljit S Khakh

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract / Description of output

Astrocytes are implicated in neurodegenerative disorders and may contribute to striatal neuron loss or dysfunction in Huntington’s disease (HD). Here, we assessed striatal astrocyte gene and protein signatures in two HD mouse models at three stages and compared our results to human HD data at four clinical grades and to mice exhibiting polyglutamine length–dependent pathology. We found disease-model and stage-specific alterations and discovered a core disease-associated astrocyte molecular signature comprising 62 genes that were conserved between mice and humans. Our results show little evidence of neurotoxic A1 astrocytes that have been proposed to be causal for neuronal death in neurodegenerative disorders such as HD. Furthermore, 61 of the 62-core gene expression changes within astrocytes were reversed in a HD mouse model by lowering astrocyte mutant huntingtin protein (mHTT) expression using zinc finger protein (ZFP) transcriptional repressors. Our findings indicate that HD astrocytes progressively lose essential normal functions, some of which can be remedied by lowering mHTT. The data have implications for neurodegenerative disease rescue and repair strategies as well as specific therapeutic relevance for mHTT reduction and contribute to a better understanding of fundamental astrocyte biology and its contributions to disease.
Original languageEnglish
Article numbereaaw8546
Number of pages12
JournalScience Translational Medicine
Volume11
Issue number514
Early online date16 Oct 2019
DOIs
Publication statusE-pub ahead of print - 16 Oct 2019

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