Martirosyan, A. | Search bioRxiv

bioRxiv2018

Molecularly distinct astrocyte subpopulations spatially pattern the adult mouse brain

Astrocytes are a numerous cell type of the central nervous system. They perform many important functions in synapse formation and maintenance, control of local homeostasis and modulation of synaptic transmission. However, the degree to which specialist astrocyte subtypes fulfil these specific tasks is currently unclear. Here we use single cell transcriptomics to demonstrate that astrocytes, even those lying within the same region of adult mouse brain, show distinct molecular and spatial profiles, with profound implications for local CNS functions, including axon guidance, synaptogenesis and synaptic transmission.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2017

Translating ceRNA susceptibilities into correlation functions

Competition to bind microRNAs induces an effective positive crosstalk between their targets, therefore known as competing endogenous RNAs or ceRNAs. While such an effect is known to play a significant role in specific situations, estimating its strength from data and, experimentally, in physiological conditions appears to be far from simple. Here we show that the susceptibility of ceRNAs to different types of perturbations affecting their competitors (and hence their tendency to crosstalk) can be encoded in quantities as intuitive and as simple to measure as correlation functions. We confirm this scenario by extensive numerical simulations and validate it by re-analyzing PTENs crosstalk pattern from TCGA breast cancer database. These results clarify the links between different quantities used to estimate the intensity of ceRNA crosstalk and provide new keys to analyze transcriptional datasets and effectively probe ceRNA networks in silico.

systems biology↗