0000000000008541
AUTHOR
Fabian J. Theis
Model Based Targeting of IL-6-Induced Inflammatory Responses in Cultured Primary Hepatocytes to Improve Application of the JAK Inhibitor Ruxolitinib
IL-6 is a central mediator of the immediate induction of hepatic acute phase proteins (APP) in the liver during infection and after injury, but increased IL-6 activity has been associated with multiple pathological conditions. In hepatocytes, IL-6 activates JAK1-STAT3 signaling that induces the negative feedback regulator SOCS3 and expression of APPs. While different inhibitors of IL-6-induced JAK1-STAT3-signaling have been developed, understanding their precise impact on signaling dynamics requires a systems biology approach. Here we present a mathematical model of IL-6-induced JAK1-STAT3 signaling that quantitatively links physiological IL-6 concentrations to the dynamics of IL-6-induced …
Network reconstruction for trans acting genetic loci using multi-omics data and prior information.
Background: Molecular measurements of the genome, the transcriptome, and the epigenome, often termed multi-omics data, provide an in-depth view on biological systems and their integration is crucial for gaining insights in complex regulatory processes. These data can be used to explain disease related genetic variants by linking them to intermediate molecular traits (quantitative trait loci, QTL). Molecular networks regulating cellular processes leave footprints in QTL results as so-called trans-QTL hotspots. Reconstructing these networks is a complex endeavor and use of biological prior information can improve network inference. However, previous efforts were limited in the types of priors…
Subtle Changes in Clonal Dynamics Underlie the Age-Related Decline in Neurogenesis
SUMMARYNeural stem cells in the adult murine brain have only a limited capacity to self-renew, and the number of neurons they generate drastically declines with age. How cellular dynamics sustain neurogenesis and how alterations with age may result in this decline, are both unresolved issues. Therefore, we clonally traced neural stem cell lineages using confetti reporters in young and middle-aged adult mice. To understand underlying mechanisms, we derived mathematical population models of adult neurogenesis that explain the observed clonal cell type abundances. Models fitting the data best consistently show self renewal of transit amplifying progenitors and rapid neuroblast cell cycle exit.…
Increasing Neural Stem Cell Division Asymmetry and Quiescence Are Predicted to Contribute to the Age-Related Decline in Neurogenesis.
Summary: Adult murine neural stem cells (NSCs) generate neurons in drastically declining numbers with age. How cellular dynamics sustain neurogenesis and how alterations with age may result in this decline are unresolved issues. We therefore clonally traced NSC lineages using confetti reporters in young and middle-aged adult mice. To understand the underlying mechanisms, we derived mathematical models that explain observed clonal cell type abundances. The best models consistently show self-renewal of transit-amplifying progenitors and rapid neuroblast cell cycle exit. In middle-aged mice, we identified an increased probability of asymmetric stem cell divisions at the expense of symmetric di…
Genome-wide association analyses identify 18 new loci associated with serum urate concentrations
Elevated serum urate concentrations can cause gout, a prevalent and painful inflammatory arthritis. By combining data from >140,000 individuals of European ancestry within the Global Urate Genetics Consortium (GUGC), we identified and replicated 28 genome-wide significant loci in association with serum urate concentrations (18 new regions in or near TRIM46, INHBB, SFMBT1, TMEM171, VEGFA, BAZ1B, PRKAG2, STC1, HNF4G, A1CF, ATXN2, UBE2Q2, IGF1R, NFAT5, MAF, HLF, ACVR1B-ACVRL1 and B3GNT4). Associations for many of the loci were of similar magnitude in individuals of non-European ancestry. We further characterized these loci for associations with gout, transcript expression and the fractional…
Additional file 1 of Network reconstruction for trans acting genetic loci using multi-omics data and prior information
Additional file 1 Supplementary material, supporting figures and tables.
Transcriptional Mechanisms of Proneural Factors and REST in Regulating Neuronal Reprogramming of Astrocytes
Summary Direct lineage reprogramming induces dramatic shifts in cellular identity, employing poorly understood mechanisms. Recently, we demonstrated that expression of Neurog2 or Ascl1 in postnatal mouse astrocytes generates glutamatergic or GABAergic neurons. Here, we take advantage of this model to study dynamics of neuronal cell fate acquisition at the transcriptional level. We found that Neurog2 and Ascl1 rapidly elicited distinct neurogenic programs with only a small subset of shared target genes. Within this subset, only NeuroD4 could by itself induce neuronal reprogramming in both mouse and human astrocytes, while co-expression with Insm1 was required for glutamatergic maturation. Cu…
Separation of Uncorrelated Stationary time series using Autocovariance Matrices
Blind source separation (BSS) is a signal processing tool, which is widely used in various fields. Examples include biomedical signal separation, brain imaging and economic time series applications. In BSS, one assumes that the observed $p$ time series are linear combinations of $p$ latent uncorrelated weakly stationary time series. The aim is then to find an estimate for an unmixing matrix, which transforms the observed time series back to uncorrelated latent time series. In SOBI (Second Order Blind Identification) joint diagonalization of the covariance matrix and autocovariance matrices with several lags is used to estimate the unmixing matrix. The rows of an unmixing matrix can be deriv…
Model selection using limiting distributions of second-order blind source separation algorithms
Signals, recorded over time, are often observed as mixtures of multiple source signals. To extract relevant information from such measurements one needs to determine the mixing coefficients. In case of weakly stationary time series with uncorrelated source signals, this separation can be achieved by jointly diagonalizing sample autocovariances at different lags, and several algorithms address this task. Often the mixing estimates contain close-to-zero entries and one wants to decide whether the corresponding source signals have a relevant impact on the observations or not. To address this question of model selection we consider the recently published second-order blind identification proced…
DeepWAS: Multivariate genotype-phenotype associations by directly integrating regulatory information using deep learning
Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) identify genetic variants associated with traits or diseases. GWAS never directly link variants to regulatory mechanisms. Instead, the functional annotation of variants is typically inferred by post hoc analyses. A specific class of deep learning-based methods allows for the prediction of regulatory effects per variant on several cell type-specific chromatin features. We here describe “DeepWAS”, a new approach that integrates these regulatory effect predictions of single variants into a multivariate GWAS setting. Thereby, single variants associated with a trait or disease are directly coupled to their impact on a chromatin feature in a cell type. Up to…
Meeting the Challenges of High-Dimensional Single-Cell Data Analysis in Immunology
Recent advances in cytometry have radically altered the fate of single-cell proteomics by allowing a more accurate understanding of complex biological systems. Mass cytometry (CyTOF) provides simultaneous single-cell measurements that are crucial to understand cellular heterogeneity and identify novel cellular subsets. High-dimensional CyTOF data were traditionally analyzed by gating on bivariate dot plots, which are not only laborious given the quadratic increase of complexity with dimension but are also biased through manual gating. This review aims to discuss the impact of new analysis techniques for in-depths insights into the dynamics of immune regulation obtained from static snapshot …
Clinical impact of GATA2 mutations in acute myeloid leukemia patients harboring CEBPA mutations: a study of the AML study group.
Clinical impact of GATA2 mutations in acute myeloid leukemia patients harboring CEBPA mutations: a study of the AML study group
Additional file 2 of Network reconstruction for trans acting genetic loci using multi-omics data and prior information
Additional file 2 Supplementary tables, large supporting tables with table titles as tabs.