Neurodegenerative disease-associated protein aggregates are poor inducers of the heat shock response in neuronal-like cells

Protein aggregation that results in the formation of inclusions is strongly correlated with neuronal death and is a pathological hallmark common to many neurodegenerative diseases, including amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and Huntingtons disease. Cells are thought to dramatically up-regulate the levels of heat shock proteins during periods of cellular stress via induction of the heat shock response (HSR). Heat shock proteins are well-characterised molecular chaperones that interact with aggregation-prone proteins to either stabilise, refold, or traffic protein for degradation. The reason why heat shock proteins are unable to maintain the solubility of particular proteins in neurodegenerative disease is unknown. We sought to determine whether neurodegenerative disease-associated protein aggregates can induce the HSR. Here, we generated a neuroblastoma cell line that expresses a fluorescent reporter under conditions of HSR induction, for example heat shock. Using these cells, we show that the HSR is not induced by exogenous treatment with aggregated forms of Parkinsons disease-associated -synuclein or the ALS-associated G93A mutant of superoxide dismutase-1 (SOD1G93A). Furthermore, flow cytometric analysis revealed that intracellular expression of SOD1G93A or a pathogenic form of polyQ-expanded huntingtin (Htt72Q), similarly, results in no or low induction of the HSR. In contrast, expression of a non-pathogenic but aggregation-prone form of firefly luciferase (Fluc) did induce an HSR in a significantly greater proportion of cells. Finally, we show that HSR induction is dependent on the intracellular levels of the aggregation-prone proteins, but the pathogenic proteins (SOD1G93A and Htt72Q) elicit a significantly lower HSR compared to the non-pathogenic proteins (Fluc). These results suggest that pathogenic proteins either evade detection or impair induction of the HSR in neuronal-like cells. Therefore, defective HSR induction may facilitate the initiation of protein aggregation leading to inclusion formation in neurodegenerative diseases.