Back

Alzheimer's disease protective allele of Clusterin modulates neuronal excitability through lipid-droplet-mediated neuron-glia communication

Zhao, X.; Li, Y.; Zhang, S.; Sudwarts, A.; Zhang, H.; Kozlova, A.; Moulton, M. J.; Goodman, L. D.; Pang, Z. P.; Sanders, A. R.; Bellen, H. J.; Thinakaran, G.; Duan, J.

2024-08-15 genetic and genomic medicine
10.1101/2024.08.14.24312009 medRxiv
Show abstract

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) of Alzheimers disease (AD) have identified a plethora of risk loci. However, the disease variants/genes and the underlying mechanisms remain largely unknown. For a strong AD-associated locus near Clusterin (CLU), we tied an AD protective allele to a role of neuronal CLU in promoting neuron excitability through lipid-mediated neuron-glia communication. We identified a putative causal SNP of CLU that impacts neuron-specific chromatin accessibility to transcription-factor(s), with the AD protective allele upregulating neuronal CLU and promoting neuron excitability. Transcriptomic analysis and functional studies in induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC)-derived neurons co-cultured with mouse astrocytes show that neuronal CLU facilitates neuron-to-glia lipid transfer and astrocytic lipid droplet formation coupled with reactive oxygen species (ROS) accumulation. These changes cause astrocytes to uptake less glutamate thereby altering neuron excitability. Our study provides insights into how CLU confers resilience to AD through neuron-glia interactions.

Matching journals

The top 6 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.