Back

The mutational landscape of single neurons and oligodendrocytes reveals evidence of inflammation-associated DNA damage in multiple sclerosis

Motyer, A.; Jackson, S.; Yang, B.; Harliwong, I.; Tian, W.; Shiu, W.; Shao, Y.; Wang, B.; McLean, C.; Barnett, M.; Kilpatrick, T. J.; Leslie, S.; Rubio, J. P.

2022-04-30 genomics
10.1101/2022.04.30.490132 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Neuroinflammation has been linked to DNA damage in multiple sclerosis (MS), but its impact on neural cell genomes at nucleotide resolution is unknown. To address this question, we performed single nucleus whole genome sequencing to determine the landscape of somatic mutation in 172 neurons and oligodendrocytes (OLs) extracted from post-mortem brain tissue from 5 MS cases and three controls. We identified two cases with a significant excess of somatic single nucleotide variants (sSNV) in neurons and OLs from MS inflammatory demyelinated lesions. For a case with primary progressive MS, this translated to a 68% increase in sSNV frequency and 32-year equivalent increase in biological age of lesion-resident cells. Mutational signature analysis conducted on all cells revealed that defective DNA repair and transcription-associated DNA damage are important mutagenic mechanism in both neurons and OLs in MS. Our findings provide the first evidence that inflammation in the brains of people with MS is associated with DNA damage, which may have implications for other neurodegenerative diseases and future drug development.

Matching journals

The top 9 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.