Ganapathiraju, M. K. | Search bioRxiv

bioRxiv2021

Mispatterned motile cilia beating causes flow blockage in the epileptic brain

Beating of motile cilia at the brain ventricular surface generates rapid flow in an evolutionary conserved pattern mediating the transport of cerebrospinal fluid, but its functional importance has yet to be demonstrated. Here we show disturbance of this transport may contribute to seizure susceptibility. Mice haploinsufficient for FoxJ1, transcription factor regulating motile cilia exhibited cilia-driven flow blockage and increased seizure susceptibility. Mutations in two epilepsy-associated kinases, Cdkl5 and Yes1, in mice resulted in similar cilia-driven flow blockage and increased seizure susceptibility. We showed this arises from disorganized cilia polarity associated with disruption in the highly organized basal body anchoring meshwork. Together these findings suggest mispatterning of cilia-generated flow may contribute to epilepsy and thus might account for seizures unresponsive to current seizure medications. One sentence summaryEpilepsy is associated with disturbance of cilia motion and mispatterning of fluid transport in the brain ventricles.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2018

Potentially repurposable drugs for schizophrenia identified from its interactome

From the schizophrenia drug-target interactome,1 we studied the drugs that targeted multiple proteins in the interactome, or those that target proteins with many targets, or those that target novel (computationally predicted) interactors of schizophrenia associated proteins. In schizophrenia, gene expression has been described as a measurable aspect of the disease reflecting the action of risk genes. We studied each of the selected drugs using the NextBio software suite, and shortlisted those that had a negative correlation with gene expression of schizophrenia. This analysis resulted in 12 drugs whose differential gene expression (drug versus normal) had an anti-correlation with differential expression for schizophrenia (disorder versus normal). Some of these drugs were already being tested for their clinical activity in schizophrenia and other neuropsychiatric disorders. Several proteins in the protein interactome of the targets of several of these drugs were associated with various neuropsychiatric disorders. The network of genes which were differentially expressed on drug treatment, and had an anti-correlation with gene expression in schizophrenia, were significantly enriched in pathways relevant to schizophrenia etiology and GWAS genes associated with traits or diseases that had pathophysiological overlap with schizophrenia. Drugs that are structurally similar to the shortlisted drugs, or targeted the same genes as these drugs, have also demonstrated clinical activity in schizophrenia and other related disorders. This integrated computational analysis may help translate insights from the schizophrenia drug-protein interactome to clinical research - an important step, especially in the field of psychiatric drug development, facing a high failure rate.

neuroscience↗