Back

Huntington's disease-specific mis-splicing captured by human-mouse intersect-RNA-seq unveils pathogenic effectors and reduced splicing factors

Elorza, A.; Marquez, Y.; Cabrera, J. R.; Sanchez-Trincado, J. L.; Santos-Galindo, M.; Hernandez, I. H.; Diaz-Hernandez, J. I.; Garcia-Escudero, R.; Irimia, M.; Lucas, J. J.

2020-05-12 neuroscience
10.1101/2020.05.11.086017 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Deregulated alternative splicing has been implicated in a wide range of pathologies. Deep RNA-sequencing has revealed global mis-splicing signatures in multiple human diseases; however, for neurodegenerative diseases, these analyses are intrinsically hampered by neuronal loss and neuroinflammation in post-mortem brains. To infer splicing alterations relevant to Huntingtons disease (HD) pathogenesis, here we performed intersect-RNA-seq analyses of human post-mortem striatal tissue and of an early symptomatic mouse model in which neuronal loss and gliosis are not yet present. Together with a human/mouse parallel motif scan analysis, this approach allowed us to identify the shared mis-splicing signature triggered by the HD-causing mutation in both species and to infer upstream deregulated splicing factors. Moreover, we identified a plethora of downstream neurodegeneration-linked effector genes, whose aberrant splicing is associated with decreased protein levels in HD patients and mice. In summary, our intersect-RNA-seq approach unveiled the pathogenic contribution of mis-splicing to HD and could be readily applied to other neurodegenerative diseases for which bona fide animal models are available.

Matching journals

The top 8 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.