Exploring regulatory networks of miR-96 in the developing inner ear.

Mutations in the microRNA Mir96 cause deafness in mice and humans. In the diminuendo mouse, which carries a single base pair change in the seed region of miR-96, the sensory hair cells crucial for hearing fail to develop fully and retain immature characteristics, suggesting that miR-96 is important for coordinating hair cell maturation. Our previous transcriptional analyses show that many genes are misregulated in the diminuendo inner ear and we report here further misregulated genes. We have chosen three complementary approaches to explore potential networks controlled by miR-96 using these transcriptional data. Firstly, we used regulatory interactions manually curated from the literature to construct a regulatory network incorporating our transcriptional data. Secondly, we built a protein-protein interaction network using the InnateDB database. Thirdly, gene set enrichment analysis was used to identify gene sets in which the misregulated genes are enriched. We have identified several candidates for mediating some of the expression changes caused by the diminuendo mutation, including Fos, Myc, Trp53 and Nr3c1, and confirmed our prediction that Fos is downregulated in diminuendo homozygotes. Understanding the pathways regulated by miR-96 could lead to potential therapeutic targets for treating hearing loss due to perturbation of any component of the network.

Super-Resolution Microscopy of Cerebrospinal Fluid Biomarkers as a Tool for Alzheimer's Disease Diagnostics.

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is neuropathologically characterized by aggregates of amyloid-ß peptides (Aß) and tau proteins. The consensus in the AD field is that Aß and tau should serve as diagnostic biomarkers for AD. However, their aggregates have been difficult to investigate by conventional fluorescence microscopy, since their size is below the diffraction limit (∼200 nm). To solve this, we turned to a super-resolution imaging technique, stimulated emission depletion (STED) microscopy, which has a high enough precision to allow the discrimination of low- and high-molecular weight aggregates prepared in vitro. We used STED to analyze the structural organization of Aß and tau in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) from 36 AD patients, 11 patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and 21 controls. We measured the numbers of aggregates in the CSF samples, and the aggregate sizes and intensities. These parameters enabled us to distinguish AD patients from controls with a specificity of ∼87% and a sensitivity of ∼79% . In addition, the aggregate parameters determined with STED microscopy correlated with the severity of cognitive impairment in AD patients. Finally, these parameters may be useful as predictive tools for MCI cases. The STED parameters of two MCI patients who developed AD during the course of the study, as well as of MCI patients whose Aß ELISA values fall within the accepted range for AD, placed them close to the AD averages. We suggest that super-resolution imaging is a promising tool for AD diagnostics.

Fluorescent in situ hybridization of synaptic proteins imaged with super-resolution STED microscopy.

Super-resolution fluorescence microscopy is still a developing field. One of the limitations has been that standard labeling assays, which had been developed for conventional imaging, must be adjusted and optimized for each super-resolution method. These methods are more sensitive to noise, and require more intense labeling than conventional microscopy, which is not always trivial to achieve. Here, we describe the use of stimulation-emission depletion (STED) microscopy to locate messenger RNAs (mRNAs) in single neurons with high spatial precision. We address several technical difficulties we encountered in using fluorescent in situ hybridization (FISH) for STED imaging. We optimized the experimental protocol to detect mRNAs and proteins simultaneously, by performing FISH and immunostaining on the same samples. We tested our imaging approach in primary hippocampal neurons, studying the mRNAs of three important presynaptic proteins (synaptobrevin, synaptotagmin, and synaptophysin). Our approach allowed us to relate changes in mRNA levels and localization to neuronal physiology, under different activity regimes and also during neuronal development. We conclude that FISH can be performed efficiently using super-resolution techniques. This should contribute significantly to the clarification of the molecular mechanisms that govern mRNA distribution and dynamics within cells.