Abstract

Background: Cerebral small vessel disease (SVD) is an important cause of stroke and vascular cognitive impairment (VCI), leading to subcortical ischemic vascular dementia. As a hereditary form of SVD with early onset, cerebral autosomal dominant arteriopathy with subcortical infarcts and leukoencephalopathy (CADASIL) represents a pure form of SVD and may thus serve as a model disease for SVD. To date, underlying molecular mechanisms linking vascular pathology and subsequent neuronal damage in SVD are incompletely understood.

Objective: We performed comparative transcriptional profiling microarray and proteomic analyses on post-mortem frontal lobe specimen from 2 CADASIL patients and 5 non neurologically diseased controls in order to identify dysregulated pathways potentially involved in the development of tissue damage in CADASIL.

Methods: Transcriptional microarray analysis of material extracted from frontal grey and white matter (WM) identified subsets of up- or down-regulated genes enriched into biological pathways mostly in WM areas. Proteomic analysis of these regions also highlighted cellular processes identified by dysregulated proteins.

Results: Discrepancies between proteomic and transcriptomic data were observed, but a number of pathways were commonly associated with genes and corresponding proteins, such as: “ribosome” identified by upregulated genes and proteins in frontal cortex or “spliceosome” associated with down-regulated genes and proteins in frontal WM.

Conclusion: This latter finding suggests that defective expression of spliceosomal components may alter widespread splicing profile, potentially inducing expression abnormalities that could contribute to cerebral WM damage in CADASIL.

Keywords: CADASIL, transcriptomic, proteomic, pathomechanisms, spliceosome, ribosome.