A team of researchers from the University of California, San Francisco, including the Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging and Center for Intelligent Imaging (ci2), studied selective vulnerability to tauopathic insults in Alzheimer's disease and offered a comprehensive exploration of the underpinnings of cell-type-specific regional vulnerability in in vivo tauopathy models.
The study, "Searching for the cellular underpinnings of the selective vulnerability to tauopathic insults in Alzheimer's disease," was authored by UCSF ci2's Ashish Raj, PhD, and published in Communications Biology.
In the study, the researchers used the coronal Allen Gene Expression Atlas (AGEA) as the source of spatially resolved gene expression data to map cell types. In total, they mapped 36 neuronal and six non-neuronal cell types, further classifying these cell types into four major classes: cortical glutamatergic neurons, hippocampal glutamatergic neurons, GABAergic neurons, and non-neuronal cells. They also assembled a set of 12 regional tauopathy datasets, each representing a unique experimental condition.
"Differential susceptibility between regions to pathological protein species like is a hallmark of AD [Alzheimer's disease] and many other neurodegenerative diseases," the authors write. "The discovery of neuronal subtypes in regions that are disproportionately afflicted by pathology has given credence to the idea that regional susceptibility may depend on its cell-type composition. Among the four classes of cell types present ... only hippocampal glutamatergic neurons showed a significantly positive association with pathology. Conversely, we found net negative associations across cortical glutamatergic neurons and GABAergic neurons and no association with non-neuronal cell types."
To read more about research and news, visit the UCSF ci2 blog.
