Extract the most out of precious neuroscience samples
Neurodegeneration, neuroinflammation, infectious disease, and neurotrauma can have devastating effects on the Central Nervous System (CNS) that impact cognitive function, behavior, mental health, and more. Understanding the role of CNS cells such as neurons, astrocytes, glia, and oligodendrocytes as well as the pathways involved in disorders such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD), Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), and Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is crucial to disease prevention, detection, and treatment.
Challenges
We know it’s difficult to acquire diseased and normal CNS tissue for research. When samples are available, extracting the most biological information from every experiment with a multi-omic platform that is easy to use is important. Traditional, low-plex methods of profiling RNA and protein such as PCR, western blotting, immunohistochemistry, or immunofluorescence staining provide limited information on CNS structure and functionality. RNA Sequencing, while more comprehensive for expression analysis, does not directly quantify transcripts, requires time-consuming, tedious steps and onerous data analysis and sacrifices the spatial arrangement of mRNAs within tissue.
NanoString offers two robust and widely-cited platforms for multiplexed proteomics and transcriptomics of challenging neuroscience sample types such as FFPE, cell lysates, and cerebrospinal fluid. The nCounter® Analysis System and GeoMx® Digital Spatial Profiler (DSP) can be used in tandem with minimal hands-on time for bulk and spatial profiling of RNA or protein to generate accurate, repeatable, and insightful results in less than 24 hours that get you to your next neuroscience publication faster.
Featured Solutions
Select from curated, multiplexed nCounter Gene Expression Panels and/or GeoMx DSP Protein assays and the Whole Transcriptome Atlas to build your own experiment. Take advantage of embedded CNS and immune cell typing signatures to quantify the relative abundance of 5 CNS cell types and 14 different immune cell types.
Related Resources
Publications
The bidirectional lung brain-axis of amyloid-β pathology: ozone dysregulates the peri-plaque microenvironment.
The mechanisms underlying how urban air pollution affects Alzheimer’s disease (AD) are largely unknown. Ozone (O3) is a reactive gas component of air pollution linked to increased AD risk, but is confined to the respiratory tract after inhalation, implicating the peripheral immune response to air pollution in AD neuropathology.
Intratarget Microdosing for Deep Phenotyping of Multiple Drug Effects in the Live Brain.
A main impediment to effective development of new therapeutics for central nervous system disorders, and for the in vivo testing of biological hypotheses in the brain, is the ability to rapidly measure the effect of novel agents and treatment combinations on the pathophysiology of native brain tissue. We have developed a miniaturized implantable microdevice (IMD) platform, optimized for direct stereotactic insertion into the brain, which enables the simultaneous measurement of multiple drug effects on the native brain tissue in situ.
Differential protein expression in the hippocampi of resilient individuals identified by digital spatial profiling.
Clinical symptoms correlate with underlying neurodegenerative changes in the vast majority of people. However, an intriguing group of individuals demonstrate neuropathologic changes consistent with Alzheimer disease (AD) yet remain cognitively normal (termed “resilient”).
