NEW YORK (Dispatches) -- Neuroscientists have revealed how using the ‘Single-cell profiling’ method affects major brain cell types and identify common, potentially targetable pathways.
Single-cell profiling technologies produce comprehensive measurements of genetic activity in individual cells, such as levels of RNA which is transcribed from DNA, so that the cell’s functions and roles of in the biology of the brain, and the pathology of disease, can be assessed. Single-cell profiling technologies go beyond genome sequencing, which catalogs the DNA present in most every cell of a person, by revealing how each cell is uniquely making use of that common set of instructions.
In a new research , MIT scientists report that they have been using single-cell profiling to see how various brain cells, such as distinct types of neurons and microglia and astrocytes act differently in disease compared to how they behave in a healthy brain. They say that while the findings of single-cell profiling studies confirm that the disease’s terrible effects are complex and far-reaching, there appear to also be five pathways that become perturbed in each of five major cell types. Investigating these pathways, they write, could produce valuable biomarkers of disease and yield meaningful targets for therapeutic intervention.
For each of these pathways in neurons, microglia, astrocytes, oligodendrocytes and oligodendrocyte precursor cells, the scientists identified specific differences in gene regulation, found in single-cell studies, that significantly occured in brains of Alzheimer’s patients or mouse models compared to healthy control samples.