Ribosomal profiling during prion disease uncovers progressive translational derangement in glia but not in neurons
Abstract
Prion diseases are caused by PrPSc, a self-replicating pathologically misfolded protein that exerts toxicity predominantly in the brain. The administration of PrPSc causes a robust, reproducible and specific disease manifestation. Here we have applied a combination of translating ribosome affinity purification and ribosome profiling to identify biologically relevant prion-induced changes during disease progression in a cell-type specific and genome-wide manner. Terminally diseased mice with severe neurological symptoms showed extensive alterations in astrocytes and microglia. Surprisingly, we detected only minor changes in the translational profiles of neurons. Prion-induced alterations in glia overlapped with those identified in other neurodegenerative diseases, suggesting that similar events occur in a broad spectrum of pathologies. Our results suggest that aberrant translation within glia may suffice to cause severe neurological symptoms and may even be the primary driver of prion disease.
Data availability
Sequencing data has been deposited in GEO under accession code GSE149805.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
H2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (706138)
- Claudia Scheckel
H2020 European Research Council (670958)
- Adriano Aguzzi
Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschungf (179040)
- Adriano Aguzzi
Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung (183563)
- Adriano Aguzzi
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Reviewing Editor
- J Paul Taylor, St Jude Children's Research Hospital, United States
Ethics
Animal experimentation: Animal experiments were performed in compliance with the Swiss Animal Protection Law, under the approval of the Veterinary office of the Canton Zurich (animal permits ZH040/15, ZH139/16).
Version history
- Received: September 10, 2020
- Accepted: September 16, 2020
- Accepted Manuscript published: September 22, 2020 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: September 30, 2020 (version 2)
Copyright
© 2020, Scheckel et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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