A prebiotic diet modulates microglial states and motor deficits in α-synuclein overexpressing mice
- California Institute of Technology, United States
- University of California, San Diego, United States
- Purdue University West Lafayette, United States
- University of Southern California, United States
- Rush University Medical Center, United States
Abstract
Parkinson's disease (PD) is a movement disorder characterized by neuroinflammation, α-synuclein pathology, and neurodegeneration. Most cases of PD are non-hereditary, suggesting a strong role for environmental factors, and it has been speculated that disease may originate in peripheral tissues such as the gastrointestinal (GI) tract before affecting the brain. The gut microbiome is altered in PD and may impact motor and GI symptoms as indicated by animal studies, though mechanisms of gut-brain interactions remain incompletely defined. Intestinal bacteria ferment dietary fibers into short-chain fatty acids, with fecal levels of these molecules differing between PD and healthy controls and in mouse models. Among other effects, dietary microbial metabolites can modulate activation of microglia, brain-resident immune cells implicated in PD. We therefore investigated whether a fiber-rich diet influences microglial function in α-synuclein overexpressing (ASO) mice, a preclinical model with PD-like symptoms and pathology. Feeding a prebiotic high-fiber diet attenuates motor deficits and reduces α-synuclein aggregation in the substantia nigra of mice. Concomitantly, the gut microbiome of ASO mice adopts a profile correlated with health upon prebiotic treatment, which also reduces microglial activation. Single-cell RNA-seq analysis of microglia from the substantia nigra and striatum uncovers increased pro-inflammatory signaling and reduced homeostatic responses in ASO mice compared to wild-type counterparts on standard diets. However, prebiotic feeding reverses pathogenic microglial states in ASO mice and promotes expansion of protective disease-associated macrophage (DAM) subsets of microglia. Notably, depletion of microglia using a CSF1R inhibitor eliminates the beneficial effects of prebiotics by restoring motor deficits to ASO mice despite feeding a prebiotic diet. These studies uncover a novel microglia-dependent interaction between diet and motor symptoms in mice, findings that may have implications for neuroinflammation and PD.
Data availability
All datasets generated or analyzed in this study can be found through the Zenodo depository: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6377704 All experimental protocols can be found on protocols.io.
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A prebiotic diet modulates microglia response and motor deficits in α-synuclein overexpressing miceZenodo, doi:10.5281/zenodo.6377704.
Article and author information
Author details
Christopher K Glass
Sarkis K Mazmanian
Funding
U.S. Department of Defense (PD160030)
- Sarkis K Mazmanian
Heritage Medical Research Institute (HMRI-15-09-01)
- Sarkis K Mazmanian
Aligning Science Across Parkinson's (ASAP-000375)
- Sarkis K Mazmanian
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Animal experimentation: All animal experiments were done under the guidance and approval of Caltech's Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC).
Copyright
© 2022, Abdel-Haq 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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