Abrogated Inflammatory Response Promotes Neurogenesis in a Murine Model of Japanese Encephalitis

Japanese encephalitis virus (JEV) induces neuroinflammation with typical features of viral encephalitis, including inflammatory cell infiltration, activation of microglia, and neuronal degeneration. The detrimental effects of inflammation on neurogenesis have been reported in various models of acute and chronic inflammation. We investigated whether JEV-induced inflammation has similar adverse effects on neurogenesis and whether those effects can be reversed using an anti-inflammatory compound minocycline.Here, using in vitro studies and mouse models, we observed that an acute inflammatory milieu is created in the subventricular neurogenic niche following Japanese encephalitis (JE) and a resultant impairment in neurogenesis occurs, which can be reversed with minocycline treatment. Immunohistological studies showed that proliferating cells were replenished and the population of migrating neuroblasts was restored in the niche following minocycline treatment. In vitro, we checked for the efficacy of minocycline as an anti-inflammatory compound and cytokine bead array showed that production of cyto/chemokines decreased in JEV-activated BV2 cells. Furthermore, mouse neurospheres grown in the conditioned media from JEV-activated microglia exhibit arrest in both proliferation and differentiation of the spheres compared to conditioned media from control microglia. These effects were completely reversed when conditioned media from JEV-activated and minocycline treated microglia was used.This study provides conclusive evidence that JEV-activated microglia and the resultant inflammatory molecules are anti-proliferative and anti-neurogenic for NSPCs growth and development, and therefore contribute to the viral neuropathogenesis. The role of minocycline in restoring neurogenesis may implicate enhanced neuronal repair and attenuation of the neuropsychiatric sequelae in JE survivors

Effects of 3D culturing conditions on the transcriptomic profile of stem-cell-derived neurons

Understanding neurological diseases requires tractable genetic systems, and engineered three-dimensional (3D) neural tissues are an attractive choice. Yet how the cellular transcriptomic profiles in these tissues are affected by the encapsulating materials and are related to the human brain transcriptome is not well understood. Here, we report the characterization of the effects of different culturing conditions on the transcriptomic profiles of induced neuronal cells and developed a method for the rapid generation of 3D co-cultures of neuronal and astrocytic cells from the same pool of human embryonic stem cells. By comparing the gene-expression profiles of neuronal cells in culture conditions relevant to the developing human brain, we found that modifying the degree of crosslinking of composite hydrogels can tune expression patterns so that they correlate with those of specific brain regions and developmental stages. Moreover, single-cell-sequencing results showed that our engineered tissues recapitulate transcriptional patterns of cell types in the human brain. Analyses of culturing conditions will inform the development of 3D neural tissues for use as tractable models of brain diseases.NIH (Grants 1R01-HG009761, 1R01-MH110049 and 1DP1-HL141201

B physics and collider physics: Working group report

As will be clear from the following report, the three main areas that came under investigation in the working group on B-physics and collider physics are (a) searches for supersymmetric particles, (b) phenomena related to B-factories, and (c) the interaction and utilization of electroweak gauge bosons in colliders. Several studies were initiated in different sub-areas coming under the above themes. Some of the studies have already yielded results that are worthy of reporting; others are still at various stages of completion

Effects of a patient-derived de novo coding alteration of CACNA1I in mice connect a schizophrenia risk gene with sleep spindle deficits

© 2020, The Author(s). CACNA1I, a schizophrenia risk gene, encodes a subtype of voltage-gated T-type calcium channel CaV3.3. We previously reported that a patient-derived missense de novo mutation (R1346H) of CACNA1I impaired CaV3.3 channel function. Here, we generated CaV3.3-RH knock-in animals, along with mice lacking CaV3.3, to investigate the biological impact of R1346H (RH) variation. We found that RH mutation altered cellular excitability in the thalamic reticular nucleus (TRN), where CaV3.3 is abundantly expressed. Moreover, RH mutation produced marked deficits in sleep spindle occurrence and morphology throughout non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep, while CaV3.3 haploinsufficiency gave rise to largely normal spindles. Therefore, mice harboring the RH mutation provide a patient derived genetic model not only to dissect the spindle biology but also to evaluate the effects of pharmacological reagents in normalizing sleep spindle deficits. Importantly, our analyses highlighted the significance of characterizing individual spindles and strengthen the inferences we can make across species over sleep spindles. In conclusion, this study established a translational link between a genetic allele and spindle deficits during NREM observed in schizophrenia patients, representing a key step toward testing the hypothesis that normalizing spindles may be beneficial for schizophrenia patients