A novel systems biology approach to evaluate mouse models of late-onset Alzheimer’s disease

Abstract

Background Late-onset Alzheimer’s disease (LOAD) is the most common form of dementia worldwide. To date, animal models of Alzheimer’s have focused on rare familial mutations, due to a lack of frank neuropathology from models based on common disease genes. Recent multi-cohort studies of postmortem human brain transcriptomes have identified a set of 30 gene co-expression modules associated with LOAD, providing a molecular catalog of relevant endophenotypes.

Results This resource enables precise gene-based alignment between new animal models and human molecular signatures of disease. Here, we describe a new resource to efficiently screen mouse models for LOAD relevance. A new NanoString nCounter® Mouse AD panel was designed to correlate key human disease processes and pathways with mRNA from mouse brains. Analysis of the 5xFAD mouse, a widely used amyloid pathology model, and three mouse models based on LOAD genetics carrying APOE4 and TREM2*R47H alleles demonstrated overlaps with distinct human AD modules that, in turn, were functionally enriched in key disease-associated pathways. Comprehensive comparison with full transcriptome data from same-sample RNA-Seq showed strong correlation between gene expression changes independent of experimental platform.

Conclusions Taken together, we show that the nCounter Mouse AD panel offers a rapid, cost-effective and highly reproducible approach to assess disease relevance of potential LOAD mouse models.

Supplementary information Supplementary information accompanies this paper at 10.1186/s13024-020-00412-5.

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Preuss, C., Pandey, R., Piazza, E., Fine, A., Uyar, A., Perumal, T., Garceau, D., Kotredes, K. P., Williams, H., Mangravite, L. M., Lamb, B. T., Oblak, A. L., Howell, G. R., Sasner, M., Logsdon, B. A., & Carter, G. W. (2020). A novel systems biology approach to evaluate mouse models of late-onset Alzheimer’s disease. Molecular Neurodegeneration, 15, 67. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13024-020-00412-5
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1750-1326
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Molecular Neurodegeneration
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