Lectures and seminars Faculty event: Lisa Bast

Title

Towards solving the Schizophrenia case: Cell Type-specific Transcriptomic Changes in the Prefrontal Cortex 

Abstract

Schizophrenia is a severe psychiatric disorder that has been associated with impaired nervous system development and an Excitation/Inhibition imbalance in the prefrontal cortex. On a molecular level, schizophrenia is moderately heritable and genetically complex. Bioinformatic analyses of genetic associations point at a limited set of neurons, mainly Excitatory cortical neurons, but other analyses suggest the importance of astrocytes and microglia. To understand different cell type’s roles in schizophrenia and reveal novel cell-type specific aetiologically relevant perturbations in schizophrenia our study integrates genetic analysis with single nucleus RNA-seq from postmortem samples of prefrontal cortex of 43 cases with schizophrenia and 42 neurotypical controls. We found that Excitatory intratelencephalic neurons had the greatest number of differentially expressed transcripts and confer most of the genetic risk for schizophrenia. Gene co-expression network analyses revealed a gene program largely shared between neuronal subtypes, Astrocytes, and Oligodendrocytes that was significantly enriched for schizophrenia risk, supporting an aetiological role for perturbed protein modification, ion transport, and mitochondrial function.

About the speaker

Lisa Bast is a computational neurobiologist and postdoctoral researcher in the Hjerling-Leffler Lab at MBB, KI. She is interested in studying molecular disease mechanisms and cell-cell communication in schizophrenia and other brain disorders.

Join the faculty event in Wargentin! After the seminar, faculty lunch will be served in Ljusgården.