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Hoglund Z, Ruiz-Uribe N, del Sastre E, Woost B, Bailey J, Hyman BT, Zwang T, Bennett RE. Brain Vasculature Accumulates Tau and Is Spatially Related to Tau Tangle Pathology in Alzheimer's Disease. bioRxiv 2024:2024.01.27.577088. [PMID: 38328111 PMCID: PMC10849642 DOI: 10.1101/2024.01.27.577088] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 02/09/2024]
Abstract
Insoluble pathogenic proteins accumulate along blood vessels in conditions of cerebral amyloid angiopathy (CAA), exerting a toxic effect on vascular cells and impacting cerebral homeostasis. In this work we provide new evidence from three-dimensional human brain histology that tau protein, the main component of neurofibrillary tangles, can similarly accumulate along brain vascular segments. We quantitatively assessed n=6 Alzheimer's disease (AD), and n=6 normal aging control brains and saw that tau-positive blood vessel segments were present in all AD cases. Tau-positive vessels are enriched for tau at levels higher than the surrounding tissue and appear to affect arterioles across cortical layers (I-V). Further, vessels isolated from these AD tissues were enriched for N-terminal tau and tau phosphorylated at T181 and T217. Importantly, tau-positive vessels are associated with local areas of increased tau neurofibrillary tangles. This suggests that accumulation of tau around blood vessels may reflect a local clearance failure. In sum, these data indicate tau, like amyloid beta, accumulates along blood vessels and may exert a significant influence on vasculature in the setting of AD.
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Affiliation(s)
- Zachary Hoglund
- Department of Neurology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, MA, USA
| | - Nancy Ruiz-Uribe
- Department of Neurology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, MA, USA
- Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
| | - Eric del Sastre
- Department of Neurology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, MA, USA
| | - Benjamin Woost
- Department of Neurology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, MA, USA
| | - Joshua Bailey
- Department of Neurology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, MA, USA
| | - Bradley T. Hyman
- Department of Neurology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, MA, USA
- Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
| | - Theodore Zwang
- Department of Neurology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, MA, USA
- Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
| | - Rachel E. Bennett
- Department of Neurology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, MA, USA
- Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
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Bryant A, Li Z, Jayakumar R, Serrano-Pozo A, Woost B, Hu M, Woodbury ME, Wachter A, Lin G, Kwon T, Talanian RV, Biber K, Karran EH, Hyman BT, Das S, Bennett R. Endothelial Cells are Heterogeneous in Different Brain Regions and are Dramatically Altered in Alzheimer's Disease. J Neurosci 2023:JNEUROSCI.0237-23.2023. [PMID: 37208174 DOI: 10.1523/jneurosci.0237-23.2023] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 02/16/2023] [Revised: 05/09/2023] [Accepted: 05/11/2023] [Indexed: 05/21/2023] Open
Abstract
Vascular endothelial cells play an important role in maintaining brain health, but their contribution to Alzheimer's disease (AD) is obscured by limited understanding of the cellular heterogeneity in normal aged brain and in disease. To address this, we performed single nucleus RNAseq on tissue from 32 human AD and non-AD donors (19 female, 13 male) each with five cortical regions: entorhinal cortex, inferior temporal gyrus, prefrontal cortex, visual association cortex and primary visual cortex. Analysis of 51,586 endothelial cells revealed unique gene expression patterns across the five regions in non-AD donors. Alzheimer's brain endothelial cells were characterized by upregulated protein folding genes and distinct transcriptomic differences in response to amyloid beta plaques and cerebral amyloid angiopathy (CAA). This dataset demonstrates previously unrecognized regional heterogeneity in the endothelial cell transcriptome in both aged non-AD and AD brain.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT:In this work, we show that vascular endothelial cells collected from five different brain regions display surprising variability in gene expression. In the presence of Alzheimer's disease pathology, endothelial cell gene expression is dramatically altered with clear differences in regional and temporal changes. These findings help explain why certain brain regions appear to differ in susceptibility to disease-related vascular remodeling events that may impact blood flow.
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Affiliation(s)
- Annie Bryant
- Department of Neurology, Harvard Medical School, MassGeneral Institute for Neurodegenerative Disease, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, MA 02129, USA
| | - Zhaozhi Li
- Department of Neurology, Harvard Medical School, MassGeneral Institute for Neurodegenerative Disease, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, MA 02129, USA
| | - Rojashree Jayakumar
- Department of Neurology, Harvard Medical School, MassGeneral Institute for Neurodegenerative Disease, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, MA 02129, USA
| | - Alberto Serrano-Pozo
- Department of Neurology, Harvard Medical School, MassGeneral Institute for Neurodegenerative Disease, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, MA 02129, USA
| | - Benjamin Woost
- Department of Neurology, Harvard Medical School, MassGeneral Institute for Neurodegenerative Disease, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, MA 02129, USA
| | - Miwei Hu
- Department of Neurology, Harvard Medical School, MassGeneral Institute for Neurodegenerative Disease, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, MA 02129, USA
| | - Maya E Woodbury
- AbbVie, Cambridge Research Center, 200 Sidney Street, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA
| | - Astrid Wachter
- AbbVie Deutschland GmbH & Co. KG, Genomics Research Center, Knollstrasse, 67061 Ludwigshafen
| | - Gen Lin
- AbbVie Deutschland GmbH & Co. KG, Genomics Research Center, Knollstrasse, 67061 Ludwigshafen
| | - Taekyung Kwon
- AbbVie, Cambridge Research Center, 200 Sidney Street, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA
| | - Robert V Talanian
- AbbVie, Cambridge Research Center, 200 Sidney Street, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA
| | - Knut Biber
- AbbVie Deutschland GmbH & Co. KG, Genomics Research Center, Knollstrasse, 67061 Ludwigshafen
| | - Eric H Karran
- AbbVie, Cambridge Research Center, 200 Sidney Street, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA
| | - Bradley T Hyman
- Department of Neurology, Harvard Medical School, MassGeneral Institute for Neurodegenerative Disease, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, MA 02129, USA
| | - Sudeshna Das
- Department of Neurology, Harvard Medical School, MassGeneral Institute for Neurodegenerative Disease, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, MA 02129, USA
| | - Rachel Bennett
- Department of Neurology, Harvard Medical School, MassGeneral Institute for Neurodegenerative Disease, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, MA 02129, USA
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Zwang TJ, Woost B, Bailey J, Hoglund Z, Richardson DS, Bennett RE, Hyman BT. Spatial characterization of tangle-bearing neurons and ghost tangles in the human inferior temporal gyrus with three-dimensional imaging. Brain Commun 2023; 5:fcad130. [PMID: 37324243 PMCID: PMC10263274 DOI: 10.1093/braincomms/fcad130] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 02/07/2023] [Revised: 03/06/2023] [Accepted: 04/17/2023] [Indexed: 06/17/2023] Open
Abstract
Studies of post-mortem human tissue provide insight into pathological processes, but are inherently limited by practical considerations that limit the scale at which tissue can be examined, and the obvious issue that the tissue reflects only one time point in a continuous disease process. We approached this problem by adapting new tissue clearance techniques to an entire cortical area of human brain, which allows surveillance of hundreds of thousands of neurons throughout the depth of the entire cortical thickness. This approach allows detection of 'rare' events that may be difficult to detect in standard 5 micrometre-thick paraffin sections. For example, it is well established that neurofibrillary tangles begin within a neuron, and ultimately, in at least some instances, persist in the brain even after the neuron has died. These are referred to as 'ghost tangles', a term that appropriately implies their 'difficult to see' ephemeral qualities. We set out to find ghost tangles as one example of the power of the tissue clearance/image analysis techniques to detect rare events, and to learn what happens at the end-point of a tangle's life history. We were able to identify 8103 tau tangles, 132 465 neurons and 299 640 nuclei in tissue samples from three subjects with severe Alzheimer's disease (Braak V-VI) and 4 tau tangles, 200 447 neurons and 462 715 nuclei in tissue samples from three subjects with no significant tau pathology (Braak 0-I). Among these data, we located 57 ghost tangles, which makes them only 0.7% of the total tau tangles observed. We found that ghost tangles are more likely to be found in cortical layers 3 and 5 (49/57), with a select few scattered across other layers 1, 2, 4 and 6. This ability to find rare events, such as ghost tangles, in large enough quantities to statistically test their distribution exemplifies how tissue clearing can be used as a powerful tool for studying selective vulnerability or resilience to pathology across brain regions.
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Affiliation(s)
- Theodore J Zwang
- Department of Neurology, MassGeneral Institute for Neurodegenerative Disease, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, MA, USA
- Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
- Massachusetts Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, Charlestown, MA, USA
| | - Benjamin Woost
- Department of Neurology, MassGeneral Institute for Neurodegenerative Disease, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, MA, USA
| | - Joshua Bailey
- Department of Neurology, MassGeneral Institute for Neurodegenerative Disease, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, MA, USA
| | - Zachary Hoglund
- Department of Neurology, MassGeneral Institute for Neurodegenerative Disease, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, MA, USA
| | - Douglas S Richardson
- Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology and Harvard Center for Biological Imaging, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA
| | - Rachel E Bennett
- Department of Neurology, MassGeneral Institute for Neurodegenerative Disease, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, MA, USA
- Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
- Massachusetts Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, Charlestown, MA, USA
| | - Bradley T Hyman
- Department of Neurology, MassGeneral Institute for Neurodegenerative Disease, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, MA, USA
- Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
- Massachusetts Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, Charlestown, MA, USA
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Bryant A, Li Z, Jayakumar R, Serrano-Pozo A, Woost B, Hu M, Woodbury ME, Wachter A, Lin G, Kwon T, Talanian RV, Biber K, Karran EH, Hyman BT, Das S, Bennett R. Endothelial Cells are Heterogeneous in Different Brain Regions and are Dramatically Altered in Alzheimer's Disease. bioRxiv 2023:2023.02.16.528825. [PMID: 36824974 PMCID: PMC9948996 DOI: 10.1101/2023.02.16.528825] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 02/18/2023]
Abstract
Vascular endothelial cells play an important role in maintaining brain health, but their contribution to Alzheimer's disease (AD) is obscured by limited understanding of the cellular heterogeneity in normal aged brain and in disease. To address this, we performed single nucleus RNAseq on tissue from 32 AD and non-AD donors each with five cortical regions: entorhinal cortex, inferior temporal gyrus, prefrontal cortex, visual association cortex and primary visual cortex. Analysis of 51,586 endothelial cells revealed unique gene expression patterns across the five regions in non-AD donors. Alzheimer's brain endothelial cells were characterized by upregulated protein folding genes and distinct transcriptomic differences in response to amyloid beta plaques and cerebral amyloid angiopathy (CAA). This dataset demonstrates previously unrecognized regional heterogeneity in the endothelial cell transcriptome in both aged non-AD and AD brain. Significance Statement In this work, we show that vascular endothelial cells collected from five different brain regions display surprising variability in gene expression. In the presence of Alzheimer's disease pathology, endothelial cell gene expression is dramatically altered with clear differences in regional and temporal changes. These findings help explain why certain brain regions appear to differ in susceptibility to disease-related vascular remodeling events that may impact blood flow.
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Zwang TJ, Bennett RE, Lysandrou M, Woost B, Zhang A, Lieber CM, Richardson DS, Hyman BT. Tissue libraries enable rapid determination of conditions that preserve antibody labeling in cleared mouse and human tissue. eLife 2023; 12:e84112. [PMID: 36656755 PMCID: PMC9889093 DOI: 10.7554/elife.84112] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 10/11/2022] [Accepted: 01/18/2023] [Indexed: 01/20/2023] Open
Abstract
Difficulty achieving complete, specific, and homogenous staining is a major bottleneck preventing the widespread use of tissue clearing techniques to image large volumes of human tissue. In this manuscript, we describe a procedure to rapidly design immunostaining protocols for antibody labeling of cleared brain tissue. We prepared libraries of 0.5-1.0 mm thick tissue sections that are fixed, pre-treated, and cleared via similar, but different procedures to optimize staining conditions for a panel of antibodies. Results from a library of mouse tissue correlate well with results from a similarly prepared library of human brain tissue, suggesting mouse tissue is an adequate substitute for protocol optimization. These data show that procedural differences do not influence every antibody-antigen pair in the same way, and minor changes can have deleterious effects, therefore, optimization should be conducted for each target. The approach outlined here will help guide researchers to successfully label a variety of targets, thus removing a major hurdle to accessing the rich 3D information available in large, cleared human tissue volumes.
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Affiliation(s)
- Theodore J Zwang
- Department of Neurology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical SchoolBostonUnited States
- Harvard Medical SchoolBostonUnited States
- Massachusetts Alzheimer’s Disease Research CenterCharlestownUnited States
| | - Rachel E Bennett
- Department of Neurology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical SchoolBostonUnited States
- Harvard Medical SchoolBostonUnited States
- Massachusetts Alzheimer’s Disease Research CenterCharlestownUnited States
| | - Maria Lysandrou
- Department of Neurology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical SchoolBostonUnited States
| | - Benjamin Woost
- Department of Neurology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical SchoolBostonUnited States
| | - Anqi Zhang
- Department of Chemical Engineering, Stanford UniversityStanfordUnited States
| | - Charles M Lieber
- Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Harvard UniversityCambridgeUnited States
| | - Douglas S Richardson
- Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology and Harvard Center for Biological Imaging, Harvard UniversityCambridgeUnited States
| | - Bradley T Hyman
- Department of Neurology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical SchoolBostonUnited States
- Harvard Medical SchoolBostonUnited States
- Massachusetts Alzheimer’s Disease Research CenterCharlestownUnited States
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Dehkordi SK, Walker J, Sah E, Bennett E, Atrian F, Frost B, Woost B, Bennett RE, Orr TC, Zhou Y, Andhey PS, Colonna M, Sudmant PH, Xu P, Wang M, Zhang B, Zare H, Orr ME. Profiling senescent cells in human brains reveals neurons with CDKN2D/p19 and tau neuropathology. Nat Aging 2021; 1:1107-1116. [PMID: 35531351 PMCID: PMC9075501 DOI: 10.1038/s43587-021-00142-3] [Citation(s) in RCA: 38] [Impact Index Per Article: 12.7] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 11/05/2020] [Accepted: 10/26/2021] [Indexed: 12/20/2022]
Abstract
Senescent cells contribute to pathology and dysfunction in animal models1. Their sparse distribution and heterogenous phenotype have presented challenges for detecting them in human tissues. We developed a senescence eigengene approach to identify these rare cells within large, diverse populations of postmortem human brain cells. Eigengenes are useful when no single gene reliably captures a phenotype, like senescence; they also help to reduce noise, which is important in large transcriptomic datasets where subtle signals from low-expressing genes can be lost. Each of our eigengenes detected ~2% senescent cells from a population of ~140,000 single nuclei derived from 76 postmortem human brains with various levels of Alzheimer's disease (AD) pathology. More than 97% of the senescent cells were excitatory neurons and overlapped with tau-containing neurofibrillary tangles (NFTs). Cyclin dependent kinase inhibitor 2D (CDKN2D/p19) was predicted as the most significant contributor to the primary senescence eigengene. RNAscope and immunofluorescence confirmed its elevated expression in AD brain tissue whereby p19-expressing neurons had 1.8-fold larger nuclei and significantly more cells with lipofuscin than p19-negative neurons. These hallmark senescence phenotypes were further elevated in the presence of NFTs. Collectively, CDKN2D/p19-expressing neurons with NFTs represent a unique cellular population in human AD with a senescence phenotype. The eigengenes developed may be useful in future senescence profiling studies as they accurately identified senescent cells in snRNASeq datasets and predicted biomarkers for histological investigation.
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Affiliation(s)
- Shiva Kazempour Dehkordi
- Glenn Biggs Institute for Alzheimer’s & Neurodegenerative Diseases, 7400 Merton Minter, San Antonio, TX, 78229, USA
- Department of Cell Systems and Anatomy, University of Texas Health San Antonio, San Antonio, Texas, USA
| | - Jamie Walker
- Glenn Biggs Institute for Alzheimer’s & Neurodegenerative Diseases, 7400 Merton Minter, San Antonio, TX, 78229, USA
| | - Eric Sah
- Department of Internal Medicine, Wake Forest School of Medicine, Winston-Salem, NC, USA
| | - Emma Bennett
- Department of Internal Medicine, Wake Forest School of Medicine, Winston-Salem, NC, USA
| | - Farzaneh Atrian
- Department of Cell Systems and Anatomy, University of Texas Health San Antonio, San Antonio, Texas, USA
- Sam and Ann Barshop Institute for Longevity and Aging Studies, University of Texas Health San Antonio, San Antonio, Texas, USA
| | - Bess Frost
- Glenn Biggs Institute for Alzheimer’s & Neurodegenerative Diseases, 7400 Merton Minter, San Antonio, TX, 78229, USA
- Department of Cell Systems and Anatomy, University of Texas Health San Antonio, San Antonio, Texas, USA
- Sam and Ann Barshop Institute for Longevity and Aging Studies, University of Texas Health San Antonio, San Antonio, Texas, USA
| | - Benjamin Woost
- Department of Neurology, MassGeneral Institute for Neurodegenerative Disease, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Charlestown, MA, 02129, USA
| | - Rachel E. Bennett
- Department of Neurology, MassGeneral Institute for Neurodegenerative Disease, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Charlestown, MA, 02129, USA
| | - Timothy C. Orr
- Department of Healthcare Innovations, Wake Forest School of Medicine, Winston-Salem, NC, USA
| | - Yingyue Zhou
- Department of Pathology and Immunology, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, MO, USA
| | - Prabhakar S. Andhey
- Department of Pathology and Immunology, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, MO, USA
| | - Marco Colonna
- Department of Pathology and Immunology, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, MO, USA
| | - Peter H. Sudmant
- Department of Integrative Biology, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, 94720, USA
| | - Peng Xu
- Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, One Gustave L. Levy Place, New York, NY, 10029, USA
- Mount Sinai Center for Transformative Disease Modeling, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, One Gustave L. Levy Place, New York, NY, 10029, USA
- Icahn Institute for Data Science and Genomic Technology, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, One Gustave L. Levy Place, New York, NY, 10029, USA
| | - Minghui Wang
- Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, One Gustave L. Levy Place, New York, NY, 10029, USA
- Mount Sinai Center for Transformative Disease Modeling, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, One Gustave L. Levy Place, New York, NY, 10029, USA
- Icahn Institute for Data Science and Genomic Technology, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, One Gustave L. Levy Place, New York, NY, 10029, USA
| | - Bin Zhang
- Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, One Gustave L. Levy Place, New York, NY, 10029, USA
- Mount Sinai Center for Transformative Disease Modeling, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, One Gustave L. Levy Place, New York, NY, 10029, USA
- Icahn Institute for Data Science and Genomic Technology, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, One Gustave L. Levy Place, New York, NY, 10029, USA
- Department of Department of Pharmacological Sciences, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, One Gustave L. Levy Place, New York, NY, 10029, USA
| | - Habil Zare
- Glenn Biggs Institute for Alzheimer’s & Neurodegenerative Diseases, 7400 Merton Minter, San Antonio, TX, 78229, USA
- Department of Cell Systems and Anatomy, University of Texas Health San Antonio, San Antonio, Texas, USA
| | - Miranda E. Orr
- Department of Internal Medicine, Wake Forest School of Medicine, Winston-Salem, NC, USA
- Salisbury VA Medical Center, Salisbury, NC, USA
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