Neuro-SysMed seminar – Informatics

Speaker: Gonzalo Sanchez Nido

Title: Decoding neurodegeneration - one cell at a time

Place: The auditorium in Armauer Hansens Hus (campus Haukeland University Hospital)

Time: Wednesday June 21 at 11:30 - 13:00 (lunch from 11:30 - 12:00).

Registration link: is available here

Lecture language: English

Abstract: Neurodegenerative diseases affect more than 100 million people worldwide and their prevalence is expected to double by 2050. With the vast majority of cases of the common neurodegenerative diseases being idiopathic, the lack of a mechanistic understanding of their pathogenesis represents one of the greatest challenges in neuroscience and public health. In order to shed light on the aetiology and pathogenesis of neurodegenerative disorders, a large number of next-generation sequencing-based studies of bulk brain tissue have attempted to nominate genes and pathways. However, due to the disease complexity and the unavoidable cellular heterogeneity of brain tissue samples, omic studies to date present contradictory and only partially overlapping results.

In this seminar I will discuss the impact of the inherent cell type variability of bulk-brain samples in the validity and interpretability of the results, especially in cases where cellularity is confounded with the disease status. To circumvent this limitation, we have resorted to single-cell RNA-sequencing to study the alpha-synuclein spectrum, an approach that holds the potential to differentiate between disease-specific regulatory changes and altered cell type and synaptic composition of the samples. I will present our latest results and elaborate on how such a high-resolution transcriptomic landscape can inform about pathological mechanisms and highlight potential biomarkers for neurodegenerative diseases.