The Microglial Sensome Revealed by Direct RNA Sequencing
By S. Hickman, Nathan D. Kingery, Toshiro K. Ohsumi, Mark L. Borowsky, Li-chong Wang, T. Means, J. E. Khoury. Nature Neuroscience, 2013
1,394 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Microglia, the principal neuroimmune sentinels of the brain, continuously sense changes in their environment and respond to invading pathogens, toxins and cellular debris. Microglia exhibit plasticity and can assume neurotoxic or neuroprotective priming states that determine their responses to danger. We used direct RNA sequencing, without amplification or cDNA synthesis, to determine the quantitative transcriptomes of microglia of healthy adult and aged mice. We validated our findings using fluorescence dual in situ hybridization, unbiased proteomic analysis and quantitative PCR. We found that microglia have a distinct transcriptomic signature and express a unique cluster of transcripts encoding proteins for sensing endogenous ligands and microbes that we refer to as the sensome. With aging, sensome transcripts for endogenous ligand recognition were downregulated, whereas those involved in microbe recognition and host defense were upregulated. In addition, aging was associated with an overall increase in the expression of microglial genes involved in neuroprotection.
Subfields: Immunology, Neurology, Physiology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8262571fad390bc6743ff6d29f4c9b177d16402e
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Citations in the corpus
- Cell type– and brain region–resolved mouse brain proteome (2015, neutral): “Q4 7,940 1 (112) 2 (9) 2 (3) 10 (3) 370 124 29 Q3 Q2 Q1 Neurons total”
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