Subcellular sequencing of single neurons reveals the dendritic transcriptome of GABAergic interneurons

Abstract

Although mRNAs are localized in the processes of excitatory neurons, it is still unclear whether interneurons also localize a large population of mRNAs. In addition, the variability in the localized mRNA population within and between cell-types is unknown. Here we describe the unbiased transcriptomic characterization of the subcellular compartments of hundreds of single neurons. We separately profiled the dendritic and somatic transcriptomes of individual rat hippocampal neurons and investigated mRNA abundances in the soma and dendrites of single glutamatergic and GABAergic neurons. We found that, like their excitatory counterparts, interneurons contain a rich repertoire of ~4000 mRNAs. We observed more cell type-specific features among somatic transcriptomes than their associated dendritic transcriptomes. Finally, using cell-type specific metabolic labelling of isolated neurites, we demonstrated that the processes of Glutamatergic and, notably, GABAergic neurons were capable of local translation, suggesting mRNA localization and local translation is a general property of neurons.

Data availability

Sequencing data have been deposited in GEO under accession code GSE157204

The following data sets were generated

Article and author information

Author details

  1. Julio D Perez

    Synaptic Plasticity, Max Planck Institute for Brain Research, Frankfurt, Germany
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
    ORCID icon "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-8769-9306
  2. Susanne tom Dieck

    Synaptic Plasticity, Max Planck Institute for Brain Research, Frankfurt, Germany
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
    ORCID icon "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-5884-8640
  3. Beatriz Alvarez-Castelao

    Synaptic Plasticity, Max Planck Institute for Brain Research, Frankfurt, Germany
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
    ORCID icon "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0001-7505-1855
  4. Georgi Tushev

    Synaptic Plasticity, Max Planck Institute for Brain Research, Frankfurt, Germany
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
  5. Ivy CW Chan

    Synaptic Plasticity, Max Planck Institute for Brain Research, Frankfurt, Germany
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
  6. Erin M Schuman

    Synaptic Plasticity, Max Planck Institute for Brain Research, Frankfurt, Germany
    For correspondence
    erin.schuman@brain.mpg.de
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
    ORCID icon "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-7053-1005

Funding

H2020 European Research Council

  • Erin M Schuman

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Ethics

Animal experimentation: The procedures involving animal treatment and care wereconducted in conformity with the institutional guidelines that are in compliance with thenational and international laws and policies (DIRECTIVE2010/63/EU; German animalwelfare law, FELASA guidelines) and approved by and reported to the local governmentalsupervising authorities (Regierungspräsidium Darmstadt). The animals were euthanizedaccording to annex 2 of {section sign}2 Abs. 2 Tierschutz-Versuchstier-Verordnung.

Copyright

© 2021, Perez 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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https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.63092

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