Project description:Hexanucleotide repeat expansion in the C9ORF72 gene is the most frequent inherited cause of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD). Poly-GR is one of the most toxic dipeptide repeat (DPR) proteins translated from the RNA repeats. It has been shown to affect protein synthesis, but how this contributes to neurodegeneration is not clear. Here, we found that poly-GR inhibits global translation by perturbing translation elongation. We identified that the transcripts with relatively slow elongation rate tend to be further stalled by poly-GR in iPSC-differentiated neurons. This increases ribosome collision and ZAKα-mediated ribotoxic stress response (RSR), which elevates the phosphorylation of p38 and promotes cell death. Knockdown of ZAKα or pharmacological inhibition of p38 can ameliorate the GR toxicity, and improve the survival of C9ORF72-ALS/FTD patient-derived iPSC-neurons. Our study reveals molecular mechanism of poly-GR mediated toxicity on global translatome, and identifies RSR as a potential therapeutic target for C9ORF72-ALS/FTD.
Project description:Reactive astrocytes are implicated in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), although the mechanisms controlling reactive transformation are unknown. We show that decreased intron retention (IR) is common to human induced pluripotent stem cell (hiPSC)-derived astrocytes carrying VCP, C9orf72 and SOD1 ALS-causing mutations as well as astrocytes stimulated to undergo reactive transformation. Notably, transcripts with decreased IR and increased expression are overrepresented in reactivity processes including cell-adhesion, stress-response, and immune-activation. We examined astrocyte translatome sequencing (TRAP-seq) from a SOD1 mouse model, which revealed a significant number of transcripts with reduced IR in ALS are upregulated in translation. Using nucleo-cytoplasmic fractionation of VCP astrocytes coupled with mRNA sequencing and proteomics, we identify that decreased IR in nuclear-detained transcripts is associated with increased cytoplasmic expression of genes and proteins encoding regulators of reactivity - indicating nuclear-to-cytoplasmic translocation and translation of spliced reactivity-related transcripts. These results provide novel insights into the molecular factors controlling the reactive transformation of ALS astrocytes.
Project description:Whole genome sequencing of 10 HCLc tumor and matched-germline T cells. Genomic DNA from highly purified HCLc tumor and T cell populations were utilized for library preparation using NEBNext Ultra DNA library prep kit. Sequencing was performed as 150 bp paired end sequencing using four lanes of an Illumina HiSeq4000 to an average depth of 12X. Reads from each library were aligned to the human reference genome GRCh37 using BWA-MEM (v0.7.12). The analysis of somatic genetic alterations in WGS data from tumor-germline pair HCLc samples was divided based on the nature of the mutation, as follow: single-nucleotide variants (SNVs), indels, CNAs and SVs. Moreover, COSMIC mutational signatures and subclonal architecture was inferred for each tumor.
Project description:The data contained in this Experiment come from 10X Chromium Genomics WGS of HepG2 cell line For data usage terms and conditions, please refer to http://www.genome.gov/27528022 and http://www.genome.gov/Pages/Research/ENCODE/ENCODE_Data_Use_Policy_for_External_Users_03-07-14.pdf