AUTHOR=Lange Jenny , Wood-Kaczmar Alison , Ali Aneesa , Farag Sahar , Ghosh Rhia , Parker Jennifer , Casey Caroline , Uno Yumiko , Kunugi Akiyoshi , Ferretti Patrizia , Andre Ralph , Tabrizi Sarah J. TITLE=Mislocalization of Nucleocytoplasmic Transport Proteins in Human Huntington’s Disease PSC-Derived Striatal Neurons JOURNAL=Frontiers in Cellular Neuroscience VOLUME=15 YEAR=2021 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/cellular-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fncel.2021.742763 DOI=10.3389/fncel.2021.742763 ISSN=1662-5102 ABSTRACT=

Huntington’s disease (HD) is an inherited neurodegenerative disorder caused by a CAG repeat expansion in the huntingtin gene (HTT). Disease progression is characterized by the loss of vulnerable neuronal populations within the striatum. A consistent phenotype across HD models is disruption of nucleocytoplasmic transport and nuclear pore complex (NPC) function. Here we demonstrate that high content imaging is a suitable method for detecting mislocalization of lamin-B1, RAN and RANGAP1 in striatal neuronal cultures thus allowing a robust, unbiased, highly powered approach to assay nuclear pore deficits. Furthermore, nuclear pore deficits extended to the selectively vulnerable DARPP32 + subpopulation neurons, but not to astrocytes. Striatal neuron cultures are further affected by changes in gene and protein expression of RAN, RANGAP1 and lamin-B1. Lowering total HTT using HTT-targeted anti-sense oligonucleotides partially restored gene expression, as well as subtly reducing mislocalization of proteins involved in nucleocytoplasmic transport. This suggests that mislocalization of RAN, RANGAP1 and lamin-B1 cannot be normalized by simply reducing expression of CAG-expanded HTT in the absence of healthy HTT protein.