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Absence of Ndn, encoding the Prader-Willi syndrome-deleted gene necdin, results in congenital deficiency of central respiratory drive in neonatal mice.

ABSTRACT: necdin (Ndn) is one of a cluster of genes deleted in the neurodevelopmental disorder Prader-Willi syndrome. necdin is upregulated during neuronal differentiation and is thought to play a role in cell cycle arrest in terminally differentiated neurons. Most necdin-deficient Ndn(tm2Stw) mutant pups carrying a targeted replacement of Ndn with a lacZ reporter gene die in the neonatal period of apparent respiratory insufficiency. We now demonstrate that the defect can be explained by abnormal neuronal activity within the putative respiratory rhythm-generating center, the pre-Bötzinger complex. Specifically, the rhythm is unstable with prolonged periods of depression of respiratory rhythmogenesis. These observations suggest that the developing respiratory center is particularly sensitive to loss of necdin activity and may reflect abnormalities of respiratory rhythm-generating neurons or conditioning neuromodulatory drive. We propose that necdin deficiency may contribute to observed respiratory abnormalities in individuals with Prader-Willi syndrome through a similar suppression of central respiratory drive.

SUBMITTER: Ren J

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6741983 | biostudies-literature | 2003 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Absence of Ndn, encoding the Prader-Willi syndrome-deleted gene necdin, results in congenital deficiency of central respiratory drive in neonatal mice.

Ren Jun J Lee Syann S Pagliardini Silvia S Gérard Matthieu M Stewart Colin L CL Greer John J JJ Wevrick Rachel R

The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience 20030301 5

necdin (Ndn) is one of a cluster of genes deleted in the neurodevelopmental disorder Prader-Willi syndrome. necdin is upregulated during neuronal differentiation and is thought to play a role in cell cycle arrest in terminally differentiated neurons. Most necdin-deficient Ndn(tm2Stw) mutant pups carrying a targeted replacement of Ndn with a lacZ reporter gene die in the neonatal period of apparent respiratory insufficiency. We now demonstrate that the defect can be explained by abnormal neuronal ...[more]

PMID: 12629158

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Project description:Genomic imprinting is a process that causes genes to be expressed from one allele only according to parental origin, the other allele being silent. Diseases can arise when the normally active alleles are not expressed. In this context, low level of expression of the normally silent alleles has been considered as genetic noise although such expression has never been further studied. Prader-Willi Syndrome (PWS) is a neurodevelopmental disease involving imprinted genes, including NDN, which are only expressed from the paternally inherited allele, with the maternally inherited allele silent. We present the first in-depth study of the low expression of a normally silent imprinted allele, in pathological context. Using a variety of qualitative and quantitative approaches and comparing wild-type, heterozygous and homozygous mice deleted for Ndn, we show that, in absence of the paternal Ndn allele, the maternal Ndn allele is expressed at an extremely low level with a high degree of non-genetic heterogeneity. The level of this expression is sex-dependent and shows transgenerational epigenetic inheritance. In about 50% of mutant mice, this expression reduces birth lethality and severity of the breathing deficiency, correlated with a reduction in the loss of serotonergic neurons. In wild-type brains, the maternal Ndn allele is never expressed. However, using several mouse models, we reveal a competition between non-imprinted Ndn promoters which results in monoallelic (paternal or maternal) Ndn expression, suggesting that Ndn allelic exclusion occurs in the absence of imprinting regulation. Importantly, specific expression of the maternal NDN allele is also detected in post-mortem brain samples of PWS individuals. Our data reveal an unexpected epigenetic flexibility of PWS imprinted genes that could be exploited to reactivate the functional but dormant maternal alleles in PWS. Overall our results reveal high non-genetic heterogeneity between genetically identical individuals that might underlie the variability of the phenotype.

Project description:BACKGROUND: The human Prader-Willi syndrome (PWS) domain and its mouse orthologue include a cluster of paternally expressed genes which imprinted expression is co-ordinately regulated by an imprinting center (IC) closely associated to the Snurf-Snrpn gene. Besides their co-regulated imprinted expression, two observations suggest that the spatio-temporal expression of these genes could also be co-regulated. First, the PWS genes have all been reported to be expressed in the mouse nervous system. Second, Snurf-Snrpn and its associated IC are the most ancient elements of the domain which later acquired additional functional genes by retrotransposition. Although located at least 1.5 megabases from the IC, these retroposons acquired the same imprinted regulation as Snurf-Snrpn. In this study, we ask whether the IC, in addition to its function in imprinting, could also be involved in the spatio-temporal regulation of genes in the PWS domain. RESULTS: We compared the expression pattern of Snurf-Snrpn and C/D-box small nucleolar RNAs (snoRNAs) MBII-85 and MBII-52 to the expression pattern of the two evolutionary related retroposons Ndn and Magel2, in the developing mouse embryo. We show that these genes have highly similar expression patterns in the central nervous system, suggesting that they share a common central nervous system-specific regulatory element. Among these genes, Ndn and Magel2 display the most similar expression patterns. Using transgenic mice containing the Ndn and Magel2 genes, we show that the transgenic Ndn gene whereas not imprinted is correctly expressed. Search for DNase I hypersensitive sites in the Ndn-Magel2 genomic region and comparative genomic analyses were performed in order to identify potential transcriptional cis-regulatory elements. CONCLUSIONS: These results strongly suggest that paternally expressed genes of the PWS domain share a common central nervous system-specific regulatory element. We proposed that this regulatory element could co-localize with the IC. However, we demonstrate that the IC, if required for imprinted regulation, is not involved in the spatio-temporal regulation of distantly located retrotransposed genes such as the Ndn gene in the PWS domain.

Dataset Information

Absence of Ndn, encoding the Prader-Willi syndrome-deleted gene necdin, results in congenital deficiency of central respiratory drive in neonatal mice.

Publications

Absence of Ndn, encoding the Prader-Willi syndrome-deleted gene necdin, results in congenital deficiency of central respiratory drive in neonatal mice.

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