Retinal transcriptome of neonatal mice after optic nerve injury
Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT: We performed RNA-seq analysis on the normal and 6-hour post-ONC retinas from the embryonic day (E) 20, postnatal day (P) 1 and P3 mice to determine the retinal transcriptome profiles. The identified differentially expressed genes (DEGs) could be associated with the degeneration of axonal growth capacity after birth, and axonal regeneration. Subsequent K‐means, GO, KEGG, PPI, and GSEA analysis revealed the biological processes and regulatory pathways involved in the DEGs.
Project description:Central nervous system (CNS) trauma and neurodegenerative disorders trigger a cascade of cellular and molecular events resulting in neuronal apoptosis and regenerative failure. The pathogenic mechanisms and gene expression changes associated with these detrimental events can be effectively studied using a rodent optic nerve crush (ONC) model. The purpose of this study was to use a mouse ONC model to: (a) evaluate changes in optic nerve (ON) gene expression, (b) identify neurodegenerative pathogenic pathways and (c) discover potential new therapeutic targets. Affymetrix Mouse Gene 1.0 ST arrays were utlized to detail the global gene expression profile following optic nerve crush (ONC) in the ON of BALB/cJ mice at six different days post crush (dpc) (naive, 3 dpc, 7 dpc, 14 dpc, 21 dpc and 28 dpc) to understand the pathogenic responses in relation to neuronal loss and regenerative failure.
Project description:Purpose: We used RNA sequencing to investigate the effect of acupuncture treatment on retinal transcritome after optic nerve injury Methods: Retinal mRNA profiles of 5-week-old wild-type (WT), optic nerve crush injury (ONC), ONC injury with acupuncture treatment at acupoint GB20 (ONC-F) and ONC injury with acupuncture treatment at acupoint BL1 (ONC-J) mice were generated by deep sequencing, in triplicate, using Illumina Hiseq platform. The sequence reads that passed quality filters were analyzed with DESeq2 R package to identify differently expressed genes with padj<0.05. qRT–PCR validation was performed using TaqMan and SYBR Green assays Results: RNA-seq revealed that 436 genes including 31 transcription factors (TFs) were changed after injury, which include many well-known neural degeneration related TFs such as Jun, Ddit3, Atf3 and Atf4. Interestingly, acupuncture treatment at acupoint GB20 (Fengchi) or BL1(Jingming) after ONC injury both resulted in change of retinal gene expression, compared with ONC injury without treatment; furthermore, acupuncture treatment also reversed several gene expression status induced by axon injury. Conclusions: Our research first reported that acupuncture treatment after injury can regulated retinal transcriptome and reversed the gene expression level induced after injury, which will provide novel therapeutic targets for treatment of retinopathy diseases.
Project description:Glaucoma is a multifactorial neurodegenerative disease, characterized by degeneration of the neurons known as retinal ganglion cells (RGCs). Although distinct in vivo animal models have been used to investigate the mechanisms of both RGC degeneration and reorganization of the retina, there has been little progress in developing efficient strategies for neuroprotection in glaucoma. In the present study, we used transcriptomic profiles of Lister Hooded rats’ retinas 2 weeks after optic nerve crush (ONC) and applied systems biology approaches to better understand the molecular mechanisms by which ONC induced the remodeling of the retinal tissue. We calculated the relative expression variability scored as a statistical measure of the variability of transcript abundance in our datasets and found higher variability after ONC. Also, gene expression stability was used as a score of transcription control and we found a reduction in the number of very stably expressed genes from 336 to 124. Enrichment analysis showed that Complement cascade and Notch signaling pathway were the main affected pathways after ONC. In order to deepen our studies on these two pathways, we performed coordination analysis of genes within each pathway and with the entire transcriptome. ONC increased the number of synergistically coordinated pairs of genes and increased the number of similar profiles. This study goes beyond the regulation of individual gene expression showing striking changes in the control of expression by Complement cascade and Notch signaling functional pathways important for RGC degeneration and remodeling of the retinal tissue two weeks after ONC.
Project description:Retinal ganglion cells (RGCs) convey the major output of information collected from the eye to the brain. RGCs are irreversibly lost when injured in degenerative diseases such as glaucoma; this failure can be partially reversed by eliminating the retinal mobile zinc (Zn2+) and leads to substantial axon regeneration. ZnT3 conditional knockout in retinal amacrine cells blocks the synaptic transport of Zn2+, which promotes RGC survival and axonal regeneration in optic nerve jinjury (ONC). Here, we conducted an mRNA sequencing of flow cytometry-isolated RGCs 3 days after optic nerve injury with or without ZnT3 expression in retinal amacrine cells.
Project description:RNA was purified from retinas following crush in the presence of vehicle or DLKi The "SAMPLE_ID" sample characteristic is a sample identifier internal to Genentech. The ID of this project in Genentech's ExpressionPlot database is PRJ0010360
Project description:Central nervous system (CNS) trauma and neurodegenerative disorders trigger a cascade of cellular and molecular events resulting in neuronal apoptosis and regenerative failure. The pathogenic mechanisms and gene expression changes associated with these detrimental events can be effectively studied using a rodent optic nerve crush (ONC) model. The purpose of this study was to use a mouse ONC model to: (a) evaluate changes in retina gene expression, (b) identify neurodegenerative pathogenic pathways and (c) discover potential new therapeutic targets. Affymetrix Mouse Gene 1.0 ST arrays were utlized to detail the global gene expression profile following optic nerve crush (ONC) in the retina of BALB/cJ mice at six different days post crush (dpc) (naive, 3 dpc, 7 dpc, 14 dpc, 21 dpc and 28 dpc) to understand the pathogenic responses in relation to neuronal loss and regenerative failure.
Project description:Reactive gliosis is a complex process that involves profound changes in gene expression. We used microarray to indentify differentially expressed genes and to investigate the molecular mechanisms of reactive gliosis in optic nerve head in response to optic nerve crush injury. C57Bl/6 female mice were 6-8 weeks old at the time of optic nerve crush surgery. The optic nerve in the left eye was crush 1 mm behind the globe for 10 seconds and the right eye served as contralateral control. The animals were allowed to recover for 1 day, 3 day, 1 week, 3 weeks and 3 months before the optic nerve heads were collected. The naive control mice did not receive any surgery in either eye. Due to the small tissue size of the mouse optic nerve head, two optic nerve heads were pooled together for each microarray chip. The left eyes and the right eyes of two mice were combined respectively to form one pair of experiment and control samples. There were five biological replicates (10 mice) for each condition.
Project description:Purpose: The purpose of this study was to use RNA-seq to investigate the molecular mechanisms of damage in the early stages of the response to axonal injury, before the onset of RGC death. Methods: 12-week-old wild-type (WT) mice were used in this study. The experiment group underwent an optic nerve crush (ONC) procedure to induce axonal injury in the right eye, and the control group underwent a sham procedure. Retinal mRNA profiles were generated by deep sequencing, in triplicate, using IlluminaHiseq2000. The sequence reads were analyzed by CLC genomics workbench and R software. qRT–PCR validation was performed using TaqMan assays. Results: Using an optimized data analysis workflow, we mapped about 66 million sequence reads per sample to the mouse genome (build mm9). Differential gene expression analysis showed that endoplasmic reticulum stress-related genes and antioxidative response-related genes have been shown to be significantly upregulated 2 days after ONC. Conclusions: Our study represents the first detailed analysis of retinal transcriptomes in the early stages after axonal injury. Our results indicated that ER stress plays a key role under these conditions. Furthermore, the antioxidative defense and immune responses occurred concurrently in the early stages after axonal injury. We believe that our study will lead to a better understanding of and insight into the molecular mechanisms underlying RGC death after axonal injury. Retinal mRNA profiles of 12 week-old wild type (WT) after ONC or sham were generated by deep sequencing, in triplicate, using Illumina Hiseq2000.
Project description:Neuronal types in the central nervous system differ dramatically in their resilience to injury or insults. Here we studied selective resilience in mouse retinal ganglion cells (RGCs) following optic nerve crush (ONC), which severs their axons and leads to death of ~80% of RGCs in 2 weeks. To identify expression programs associated with differential resilience, we first used single-cell RNA-seq (scRNA-seq) to generate a comprehensive molecular atlas of 45 RGC types in adult retina. We tracked their survival after ONC, characterized transcriptomic, morphological, and physiological changes that preceded degeneration, and identified genes selectively expressed by each type. Finally, loss- and gain-of-function assays in vivo showed that manipulating some of these genes improved neuronal survival and axon regeneration following ONC. This study provides a systematic framework for parsing type-specific responses to injury, and demonstrates that these responses can be used to reveal molecular targets for intervention.
Project description:To study the role oligodendroglial Kir4.1 in regulating axonal energy metabolism, oligodendrocyte-specific Kir4.1 knockout mice and their littermate controls were used; optic nerve lysates were prepared for subsequent TMT-based proteomics.