Fig. 8: Core inflammatory astrocyte genes shared in Alzheimer’s disease, multiple sclerosis, and poly I:C and TNFα treatments in humans.

We analyzed single-cell RNA-seq data from Alzheimer’s disease patients, multiple sclerosis patients, and healthy controls. We compared the differentially regulated genes in astrocytes in these diseases with the hypoxia-, poly I:C-, and TNFα-induced genes we identified in cultures of human and mouse astrocytes. a Significant concordant gene expression changes are present in disease conditions in vivo and in astrocyte treatments in vitro. To test whether treatment A and disease B exhibited concordant gene expression changes, we counted the number of genes in the following four categories: (1) upregulated in treatment A and upregulated in disease B; (2) upregulated in treatment A and downregulated in disease B; (3) downregulated in treatment A and downregulated in disease B; and (4) downregulated in treatment A and upregulated in disease B. We used the number of genes in each of the four categories in a contingency table and used two-sided Fisher’s exact test to detect significant concordance. MS, multiple sclerosis. b, c We found 38 core inflammatory astrocyte genes shared by Alzheimer’s disease, multiple sclerosis, and poly I:C and TNFα treatment in humans, 25 of which are upregulated (b) and 13 are downregulated (c) in diseases and treatments.