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
Article and author information
Author details
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.
Metrics
-
- 7,718
- views
-
- 927
- downloads
-
- 63
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Further reading
-
- Neuroscience
Circuit function results from both intrinsic conductances of network neurons and the synaptic conductances that connect them. In models of neural circuits, different combinations of maximal conductances can give rise to similar activity. We compared the robustness of a neural circuit to changes in their intrinsic versus synaptic conductances. To address this, we performed a sensitivity analysis on a population of conductance-based models of the pyloric network from the crustacean stomatogastric ganglion (STG). The model network consists of three neurons with nine currents: a sodium current (Na), three potassium currents (Kd, KCa, KA), two calcium currents (CaS and CaT), a hyperpolarization-activated current (H), a non-voltage-gated leak current (leak), and a neuromodulatory current (MI). The model cells are connected by seven synapses of two types, glutamatergic and cholinergic. We produced one hundred models of the pyloric network that displayed similar activities with values of maximal conductances distributed over wide ranges. We evaluated the robustness of each model to changes in their maximal conductances. We found that individual models have different sensitivities to changes in their maximal conductances, both in their intrinsic and synaptic conductances. As expected, the models become less robust as the extent of the changes increases. Despite quantitative differences in their robustness, we found that in all cases, the model networks are more sensitive to the perturbation of their intrinsic conductances than their synaptic conductances.
-
- Neuroscience
When navigating environments with changing rules, human brain circuits flexibly adapt how and where we retain information to help us achieve our immediate goals.