Project description:Loss of function mutations in progranulin (GRN) cause frontotemporal dementia, but how GRN haploinsufficiency causes neuronal dysfunction remains unclear. We previously showed that GRN is neurotrophic in vitro. Here, we used an in vivo axonal outgrowth system and observed a delayed recovery in GRN-/- mice after facial nerve injury. This deficit was rescued by reintroduction of human GRN and relied on its C-terminus and on neuronal GRN production. Transcriptome analysis of the facial motor nucleus post injury identified cathepsin D (CTSD) as the most upregulated gene. In aged GRN-/- cortices, CTSD was also upregulated, but the relative CTSD activity was reduced and improved upon exogenous GRN addition. Moreover, GRN and its C-terminal granulin domain granulinE (GrnE) both stimulated the proteolytic activity of CTSD in vitro. Pull-down experiments confirmed a direct interaction between GRN and CTSD. This interaction was also observed with GrnE and stabilized the CTSD enzyme at different temperatures. Investigating the importance of this interaction for axonal regeneration in vivo we found that, although individually tolerated, a combined reduction of GRN and CTSD synergistically reduced axonal outgrowth. Our data links the neurotrophic effect of GRN and GrnE with a lysosomal chaperone function on CTSD to maintain its proteolytic capacity.
Project description:Many high-throughput biological data analyses require the calculation of large correlation matrices and/or clustering of a large number of objects. The standard R function for calculating Pearson correlation can handle calculations without missing values efficiently, but is inefficient when applied to data sets with a relatively small number of missing data. We present an implementation of Pearson correlation calculation that can lead to substantial speedup on data with relatively small number of missing entries. Further, we parallelize all calculations and thus achieve further speedup on systems where parallel processing is available. A robust correlation measure, the biweight midcorrelation, is implemented in a similar manner and provides comparable speed. The functions cor and bicor for fast Pearson and biweight midcorrelation, respectively, are part of the updated, freely available R package WGCNA.The hierarchical clustering algorithm implemented in R function hclust is an order n(3) (n is the number of clustered objects) version of a publicly available clustering algorithm (Murtagh 2012). We present the package flashClust that implements the original algorithm which in practice achieves order approximately n(2), leading to substantial time savings when clustering large data sets.
Project description:We generated iPSCs from human intervertebral disc cells which were obtained during spine fusion surgery of patients with spinal cord injury. The disc cell-derived iPSCs (diPSCs) showed similar characteristics to human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) and were efficiently differentiated into neural progenitor cells (NPCs) with the capability of differentiation into mature neurons in vitro. To examine whether the transplantation of NPCs derived from the diPSCs showed therapeutic effects, the NPCs were transplanted into mice at 9 days post-spinal cord injury. We detected a significant amelioration of hind limb dysfunction during the follow up recovery periods. Histological analysis at 5 weeks post-transplantation, we could identify undifferentiated human NPCs (Nestin+) as well as early (TUJ1+) and mature neurons (MAP2+) derived from the NPCs. Furthermore, the NPC transplantation demonstrated a preventive effect on the spinal cord degeneration resulting from the secondary injury. This study revealed that the intervertebral disc, a M-bM-^@M-^\to-be-wasteM-bM-^@M-^] tissue, removed from the surgical procedure, could provide a unique opportunity to study iPSCs derived from hardly accessible somatic cells in normal situation and also be a useful therapeutic resource to generate autologous neural cells to treat patients suffering from spinal cord injury. Total RNA was isolated using the NucleoSpin RNA II Kit (Macherey-Nagel, Duren, Germany, www.mn-net.com) according to the manufacturerM-bM-^@M-^Ys suggestions and was utilized for a genome-wide gene expression profiling experiment using the Illumina array (Illumina, San Diego, CA, USA, www.illumina.com) at Macrogen (Macrogen, Seoul, Korea, www.macrogen.com).
Project description:Progranulin (GRN) mutations causing haploinsufficiency are a major cause of frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD-TDP). Recent discoveries demonstrating sortilin (SORT1) is a neuronal receptor for PGRN endocytosis and a determinant of plasma PGRN levels portend the development of enhancers targeting the SORT1-PGRN axis. We demonstrate the preclinical efficacy of several approaches through which impairing PGRN's interaction with SORT1 restores extracellular PGRN levels. Our report is the first to demonstrate the efficacy of enhancing PGRN levels in iPSC neurons derived from frontotemporal dementia (FTD) patients with PGRN deficiency. We validate a small molecule preferentially increases extracellular PGRN by reducing SORT1 levels in various mammalian cell lines and patient-derived iPSC neurons and lymphocytes. We further demonstrate that SORT1 antagonists and a small-molecule binder of PGRN???????, residues critical for PGRN-SORT1 binding, inhibit SORT1-mediated PGRN endocytosis. Collectively, our data demonstrate that the SORT1-PGRN axis is a viable target for PGRN-based therapy, particularly in FTD-GRN patients.
Project description:We generated iPSCs from human intervertebral disc cells which were obtained during spine fusion surgery of patients with spinal cord injury. The disc cell-derived iPSCs (diPSCs) showed similar characteristics to human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) and were efficiently differentiated into neural progenitor cells (NPCs) with the capability of differentiation into mature neurons in vitro. To examine whether the transplantation of NPCs derived from the diPSCs showed therapeutic effects, the NPCs were transplanted into mice at 9 days post-spinal cord injury. We detected a significant amelioration of hind limb dysfunction during the follow up recovery periods. Histological analysis at 5 weeks post-transplantation, we could identify undifferentiated human NPCs (Nestin+) as well as early (TUJ1+) and mature neurons (MAP2+) derived from the NPCs. Furthermore, the NPC transplantation demonstrated a preventive effect on the spinal cord degeneration resulting from the secondary injury. This study revealed that the intervertebral disc, a “to-be-waste” tissue, removed from the surgical procedure, could provide a unique opportunity to study iPSCs derived from hardly accessible somatic cells in normal situation and also be a useful therapeutic resource to generate autologous neural cells to treat patients suffering from spinal cord injury.
Project description:A subset of frontotemporal dementia cases are neuropathologically defined by tau-negative, TAR DNA-binding protein-43, and ubiquitin-positive inclusions in the brain and are associated with mutations in the progranulin gene (GRN). Deep sequencing of families exhibiting late-onset dementia revealed several novel variants in GRN. Because of the small size of these families and limited availability of samples, it was not possible to determine whether the variants segregated with the disease. Furthermore, none of these families had autopsy confirmation of diagnosis. We sought to determine if these novel GRN variants alter progranulin (PGRN) protein stability, PGRN secretion, and PGRN cleavage in cultured cells. All the novel GRN variants behave like PGRN wild-type protein, suggesting that these variants represent rare polymorphisms. However, it remains possible that these variants affect other aspects of PGRN function or represent risk factors for dementia when combined with other modifying genes.
Project description:Frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disease with an age at onset generally below 65 years. Mutations in progranulin (GRN) have been reported to be able to cause FTLD through haploinsufficiency. We have sequenced GRN in 121 patients with FTLD and detected six different mutations in eight patients: p.Gly35Glufs*19, p.Asn118Phefs*4, p.Val200Glyfs*18, p.Tyr294*, p.Cys404* and p.Cys416Leufs*30. Serum was available for five of the mutations, where the serum-GRN levels were found to be >50% reduced compared with FTLD patients without GRN mutations. Moreover, the p.Cys416Leufs*30 mutation segregated in an affected family with different dementia diagnoses. The mutation frequency of GRN mutation was 6.6% in our FTLD cohort.
Project description:Induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) have emerged as a promising cell source for immune-compatible cell therapy. Although a variety of somatic cells have been tried for iPSC generation, it is still of great interest to test new cell types, especially those which are hardly obtainable in a normal situation.In this study, we generated iPSCs by using the cells originated from intervertebral disc which were removed during a spinal operation after spinal cord injury. We investigated the pluripotency of disc cell-derived iPSCs (diPSCs) and neural differentiation capability as well as therapeutic effect in spinal cord injury.The diPSCs displayed similar characteristics to human embryonic stem cells and were efficiently differentiated into neural precursor cells (NPCs) with the capability of differentiation into mature neurons in vitro. When the diPSC-derived NPCs were transplanted into mice 9 days after spinal cord injury, we detected a significant amelioration of hindlimb dysfunction during follow-up recovery periods. Histological analysis at 5 weeks after transplantation identified undifferentiated human NPCs (Nestin(+)) as well as early (Tuj1(+)) and mature (MAP2(+)) neurons derived from the transplanted NPCs. Furthermore, NPC transplantation demonstrated a preventive effect on spinal cord degeneration resulting from the secondary injury.This study revealed that intervertebral discs removed during surgery for spinal stabilization after spinal cord injury, previously considered a "waste" tissue, may provide a unique opportunity to study iPSCs derived from difficult-to-access somatic cells and a useful therapeutic resource for autologous cell replacement therapy in spinal cord injury.
Project description:Predicting how proteins interact at the molecular level is a computationally intensive task. Many protein docking algorithms begin by using fast Fourier transform (FFT) correlation techniques to find putative rigid body docking orientations. Most such approaches use 3D Cartesian grids and are therefore limited to computing three dimensional (3D) translational correlations. However, translational FFTs can speed up the calculation in only three of the six rigid body degrees of freedom, and they cannot easily incorporate prior knowledge about a complex to focus and hence further accelerate the calculation. Furthemore, several groups have developed multi-term interaction potentials and others use multi-copy approaches to simulate protein flexibility, which both add to the computational cost of FFT-based docking algorithms. Hence there is a need to develop more powerful and more versatile FFT docking techniques.This article presents a closed-form 6D spherical polar Fourier correlation expression from which arbitrary multi-dimensional multi-property multi-resolution FFT correlations may be generated. The approach is demonstrated by calculating 1D, 3D and 5D rotational correlations of 3D shape and electrostatic expansions up to polynomial order L=30 on a 2 GB personal computer. As expected, 3D correlations are found to be considerably faster than 1D correlations but, surprisingly, 5D correlations are often slower than 3D correlations. Nonetheless, we show that 5D correlations will be advantageous when calculating multi-term knowledge-based interaction potentials. When docking the 84 complexes of the Protein Docking Benchmark, blind 3D shape plus electrostatic correlations take around 30 minutes on a contemporary personal computer and find acceptable solutions within the top 20 in 16 cases. Applying a simple angular constraint to focus the calculation around the receptor binding site produces acceptable solutions within the top 20 in 28 cases. Further constraining the search to the ligand binding site gives up to 48 solutions within the top 20, with calculation times of just a few minutes per complex. Hence the approach described provides a practical and fast tool for rigid body protein-protein docking, especially when prior knowledge about one or both binding sites is available.
Project description:Progranulin (PGRN) mediates cell cycle progression and cell motility as a pleiotropic growth factor and acts as a universal regulator of cell growth, migration and transformation, cell cycle, wound healing, tumorigenesis, and cytotoxic drug resistance as a secreted glycoprotein. PGRN overexpression can induce the secretion of many inflammatory cytokines, such as IL-8, -6,-10, TNF-α. At the same time, this protein can promote tumor proliferation and the occurrence and development of many related diseases such as gastric cancer, breast cancer, cervical cancer, colorectal cancer, renal injury, neurodegeneration, neuroinflammatory, human atherosclerotic plaque, hepatocarcinoma, acute kidney injury, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease. In short, PGRN plays a very critical role in injury repair and tumorigenesis, it provides a new direction for succeeding research and serves as a target for clinical diagnosis and treatment, thus warranting further investigation. Here, we discuss the potential therapeutic utility and the effect of PGRN on the relationship between inflammation and cancer.