Project description:There are no blood-based molecular biomarkers of temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) to support clinical diagnosis. MicroRNAs are short noncoding RNAs with strong biomarker potential due to their cell-specific expression, mechanistic links to brain excitability, and stable and reliable detection in biofluids. Altered expression of circulating microRNAs has been reported in human epilepsy, but most studies collected samples from one clinical site, relied on a single platform for profiling or conducted minimal validation. We collected plasma samples from video-electroencephalogram-monitored adult TLE patients at epilepsy specialist centers in two different countries, performed genome-wide PCR-based and RNA sequencing during the discovery phase and validated in a large cohort of samples (>300 samples) that included patients with psychogenic non-epileptic seizures. After profiling, validation of the discovery cohort and validation in the larger patient groups we identified miR-27a-3p, miR-328-3p and miR-654-3p with strong TLE biomarker potential. Plasma levels of these microRNAs were regulated in the same direction in plasma from epileptic mice, and furthermore were not different to healthy controls in patients with psychogenic non-epileptic seizures. The biomarker potential was extended by determining microRNA copy number in plasma and we demonstrate rapid detection of these microRNAs using an electrochemical RNA microfluidic disk as a prototype point-of-care device. Investigation of the molecular transport mechanism in plasma determined analysis of all three microRNAs within the exosome-enriched provided highest diagnostic accuracy while levels of Argonaute-bound miR-328-3p selectively increased in patient samples collected after seizures. In situ hybridization revealed the presence of miR-27a-3p and miR-328-3p within neurons in human brain and bioinformatics analysis predicted targets linked to growth factor signaling and apoptosis. Taken together, this study extends evidence for the biomarker potential of circulating microRNAs for epilepsy diagnosis and mechanistic links to underlying pathomechanisms.

Project description:The epilepsies represent one of the most common neurological disorders. Mesial temporal lobe epilepsies (MTLE) are the most frequent form of partial epilepsies and display frequent resistance to anti-epileptic drugs thus representing a major health care problem. In TLE, the origin of seizure activity typically involves the hippocampal formation, which displays major neuropathological features, described with the term hippocampal sclerosis (HS). HS is the most frequent pathological substrate of refractory mesial temporal lobe epilepsy. Complex partial seizures (CPS) are the predominant seizure type associated with medial temporal lobe epilepsy. MTLE is commonly due to mesial temporal sclerosis (MTS). The biology underlying the epilepstic seizures and the transcriptome associated to the seizure in intractable medial temporal lobe epilepsy is ill understood. The aim of the study was to identify potential biomarkers that could identify epileptic seizure. Thus we performed transcriptome profiling of ten medial temporal lobe epilepsy cases which are resistant to the drug and underwent temporal lobectomy. The cases constitutes of patients with intractable complex partial seizure, treated medically and have undergone detailed presurgical evaluation and subjected to surgery for standard temporal lobectomy and amygdalo-hippocampectomy. The spiking areas identified after the electrocorticography will form the test tissues, which compared with the nonspiking areas removed during the surgery, from the same patient. This could probably form one of the appropriate controls, as test and control are from same patient, which eliminates the genome variations that could incur due to the comparison with the tissues from the another patient. Also this could get rid of expression changes due to the treatments undergone by the patient. We performed two color microarray wherein we labled seizure focus (spiking area) with Cy5 and non-seizure region tissues (non-spiking) with Cy3. As a strategy to test the possibility of potential diagnostic biomarkers we are intended to test the differentially regulated molecules in an independent set of epilepsy samples. Two color experiment

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