Dataset Information

A gene expression atlas for different kinds of stress in the mouse brain.

ABSTRACT: Stressful experiences are part of everyday life and animals have evolved physiological and behavioral responses aimed at coping with stress and maintaining homeostasis. However, repeated or intense stress can induce maladaptive reactions leading to behavioral disorders. Adaptations in the brain, mediated by changes in gene expression, have a crucial role in the stress response. Recent years have seen a tremendous increase in studies on the transcriptional effects of stress. The input raw data are freely available from public repositories and represent a wealth of information for further global and integrative retrospective analyses. We downloaded from the Sequence Read Archive 751 samples (SRA-experiments), from 18 independent BioProjects studying the effects of different stressors on the brain transcriptome in mice. We performed a massive bioinformatics re-analysis applying a single, standardized pipeline for computing differential gene expression. This data mining allowed the identification of novel candidate stress-related genes and specific signatures associated with different stress conditions. The large amount of computational results produced was systematized in the interactive "Stress Mice Portal".

SUBMITTER: Flati T

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7744580 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

A gene expression atlas for different kinds of stress in the mouse brain.

Flati Tiziano T Gioiosa Silvia S Chillemi Giovanni G Mele Andrea A Oliverio Alberto A Mannironi Cecilia C Rinaldi Arianna A Castrignanò Tiziana T

Scientific data 20201216 1

Stressful experiences are part of everyday life and animals have evolved physiological and behavioral responses aimed at coping with stress and maintaining homeostasis. However, repeated or intense stress can induce maladaptive reactions leading to behavioral disorders. Adaptations in the brain, mediated by changes in gene expression, have a crucial role in the stress response. Recent years have seen a tremendous increase in studies on the transcriptional effects of stress. The input raw data ar ...[more]

PMID: 33328476

Similar Datasets

Project description:High-throughput, spatially resolved gene expression techniques are poised to be transformative across biology by overcoming a central limitation in single-cell biology: the lack of information on relationships that organize the cells into the functional groupings characteristic of tissues in complex multicellular organisms. Spatial expression is particularly interesting in the mammalian brain, which has a highly defined structure, strong spatial constraint in its organization, and detailed multimodal phenotypes for cells and ensembles of cells that can be linked to mesoscale properties such as projection patterns, and from there, to circuits generating behavior. However, as with any type of expression data, cross-dataset benchmarking of spatial data is a crucial first step. Here, we assess the replicability, with reference to canonical brain subdivisions, between the Allen Institute's in situ hybridization data from the adult mouse brain (Allen Brain Atlas (ABA)) and a similar dataset collected using spatial transcriptomics (ST). With the advent of tractable spatial techniques, for the first time, we are able to benchmark the Allen Institute's whole-brain, whole-transcriptome spatial expression dataset with a second independent dataset that similarly spans the whole brain and transcriptome. We use regularized linear regression (LASSO), linear regression, and correlation-based feature selection in a supervised learning framework to classify expression samples relative to their assayed location. We show that Allen Reference Atlas labels are classifiable using transcription in both data sets, but that performance is higher in the ABA than in ST. Furthermore, models trained in one dataset and tested in the opposite dataset do not reproduce classification performance bidirectionally. While an identifying expression profile can be found for a given brain area, it does not generalize to the opposite dataset. In general, we found that canonical brain area labels are classifiable in gene expression space within dataset and that our observed performance is not merely reflecting physical distance in the brain. However, we also show that cross-platform classification is not robust. Emerging spatial datasets from the mouse brain will allow further characterization of cross-dataset replicability ultimately providing a valuable reference set for understanding the cell biology of the brain.

Project description:BackgroundThe Allen Brain Atlas (ABA) project systematically profiles three-dimensional high-resolution gene expression in postnatal mouse brains for thousands of genes. By unveiling gene behaviors at both the cellular and molecular levels, ABA is becoming a unique and comprehensive neuroscience data source for decoding enigmatic biological processes in the brain. Given the unprecedented volume and complexity of the in situ hybridization image data, data mining in this area is extremely challenging. Currently, the ABA database mainly serves as an online reference for visual inspection of individual genes; the underlying rich information of this large data set is yet to be explored by novel computational tools. In this proof-of-concept study, we studied the hypothesis that genes sharing similar three-dimensional expression profiles in the mouse brain are likely to share similar biological functions.ResultsIn order to address the pattern comparison challenge when analyzing the ABA database, we developed a robust image filtering method, dubbed histogram-row-column (HRC) algorithm. We demonstrated how the HRC algorithm offers the sensitivity of identifying a manageable number of gene pairs based on automatic pattern searching from an original large brain image collection. This tool enables us to quickly identify genes of similar in situ hybridization patterns in a semi-automatic fashion and consequently allows us to discover several gene expression patterns with expression neighborhoods containing genes of similar functional categories.ConclusionGiven a query brain image, HRC is a fully automated algorithm that is able to quickly mine vast number of brain images and identify a manageable subset of genes that potentially shares similar spatial co-distribution patterns for further visual inspection. A three-dimensional in situ hybridization pattern, if statistically significant, could serve as a fingerprint of certain gene function. Databases such as ABA provide valuable data source for characterizing brain-related gene functions when armed with powerful image querying tools like HRC.

Dataset Information

A gene expression atlas for different kinds of stress in the mouse brain.

Publications

A gene expression atlas for different kinds of stress in the mouse brain.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets