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A single-cell atlas to map sex-specific gene-expression changes in blood upon neurodegeneration.

Nature communications

Authors: Friederike Grandke, Tobias Fehlmann, Fabian Kern, David M Gate, Tobias William Wolff, Olivia Leventhal, Divya Channappa, Pascal Hirsch, Edward N Wilson, Eckart Meese, Chuanyu Liu, Quan Shi, Matthias Flotho, Yongping Li, Cynthia Chen, Yeya Yu, Jiangshan Xu, Michael Junkin, Zhifeng Wang, Tao Wu, Longqi Liu, Yong Hou, Katrin I Andreasson, Jenny S Gansen, Elvira Mass, Kathleen Poston, Tony Wyss-Coray, Andreas Keller

The clinical course and treatment of neurodegenerative disease are complicated by immune-system interference and chronic inflammatory processes, which remain incompletely understood. Mapping immune signatures in larger human cohorts through single-cell gene expression profiling supports our understanding of observed peripheral changes in neurodegeneration. Here, we employ single-cell gene expression profiling of over 909k peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) from 121 healthy individuals, 48 patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), 46 with Parkinson's disease (PD), 27 with Alzheimer's disease (AD), and 15 with both PD and MCI. The dataset is interactively accessible through a freely available website ( https://www.ccb.uni-saarland.de/adrcsc ). In this work, we identify disease-associated changes in blood cell type composition and the gene expression in a sex-specific manner, offering insights into peripheral and solid tissue signatures in AD and PD.

© 2025. The Author(s).

PMID: 40000636

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