The Caudate Nucleus Undergoes Dramatic and Unique Transcriptional Changes in Human Prodromal Huntington’s Disease Brain

The mechanisms underlying degeneration of the specific neurons in the striatum of Huntingons Disease (HD) brain are currently unknown. The striatum is massively degenerated in late stage HD, making examination of post-mortem brain tissue from symptomatic individuals problematic. Striatal tissue is largely intact in the brains of asymptomatic HD positive (HD+) gene carriers, but these samples are exceedingly rare. In this study, caudate nucleus (CAU) tissue from two asymptomatic HD+ individuals was subjected to high throughput mRNA sequencing (mRNA-Seq) for comparison with similar datasets from symptomatic HD individuals and healthy controls. The overall transcriptional response in HD+ CAU shares much of the same response observed in HD Brodmann Area 9 (BA9) samples, an area that is relatively spared from significant degeneration. A set of differentially expressed (DE) genes predominantly related to the heat shock response are found in common between brain regions, and show much higher induction in HD+ CAU than HD BA9. The most highly perturbed pathways show near complete agreement when comparing diseased tissue with control, and a random forest classifier predicted that the two HD+ CAU samples strongly resemble HD BA9 and not control BA9. Nonetheless, when genes were prioritized by their specificity to HD+ CAU, a large number of pathways spanning many biological processes emerged. Further comparison of HD+ BA9 with HD BA9 identified genes that may be early responders to disease, and have altered expression in symptomatic individuals. This study presents the first and largest examination of asymptomatic brain gene expression to date, and suggests many new avenues of investigation into the mechanisms underlying neurodegeneration in HD.