Expression profiling by high throughput sequencing
Summary
Somatic expansion of the Huntington’s disease (HD) CAG repeat drives the rate of a pathogenic process resulting in neuronal cell death. Although mechanisms of neuronal toxicity are not well delineated, transcriptional dysregulation is a likely contributor. Chromatin modifiers are implicated in both mechanisms of CAG instability and transcriptional dysregulation. Here, we tested whether histone deacetylase genes Hdac2 and Hdac3 modify molecular and cellular phenotypes in HttQ111 knock-in mice using conditional knockouts in striatal medium-spiny striatal neurons (MSNs) exhibiting extensive CAG expansion and exquisite disease vulnerability. MSN-specific Hdac2 or Hdac3 knockout attenuated CAG expansion, with the Hdac2 knockout impacting nuclear huntingtin pathology. Hdac2 knockout resulted in a substantial transcriptional response that included reversal of transcriptional dysregulation elicited by the HttQ111 allele. Our results identify novel modifiers of CAG expansion in MSNs, providing testable mechanistic hypotheses, and a potentially complex relationship between Htt and Hdac2 with implications for targeting transcriptional dysregulation in HD.
Overall design
RNA sequencing in 35 mouse striatal tissues of four genotype groups: HttQ111/+ Hdac2+/+ , Htt+/+ Hdac2+/+ , HttQ111/+ Hdac2D/D , Htt+/+ Hdac2D/D
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