Towards elucidating the structural and cellular determinants of a-synuclein seeding and toxicity

Although it has been nearly two and half decades since the discovery of alpha-synuclein (aSyn) as the major component of Lewy bodies (LBs), our understanding of the involvement of different aSyn species, their seeding, spreading and toxicity in Parkinson's disease (PD) is limited. One of the major causes underlying this knowledge gap is the unavailability of adequate tools, techniques, and model systems to capture, monitor, and evaluate the role of different aSyn species in the disease process. In addition, our understanding of cell-type specific contributions to disease pathogenesis is limited. In this thesis, we systematically address the current knowledge gaps and elucidate the structural and cellular determinants of aSyn seeding and toxicity using cellular and animal model systems of PD. In the first chapter of this thesis, we describe an antibody characterization and validation pipeline to assess the specificity of antibodies to well-characterized preparations of various aSyn species, including monomers, fibrils, and different type of oligomers. Using an array of techniques, we demonstrate that that: i) none of the antibodies tested are specific for one particular type of aSyn species, including monomers, oligomers or fibrils; ii) all antibodies that were reported to be oligomer-specific also recognized fibrillar aSyn; and iii) a few antibodies (e.g., the antibody clone 26F1, 5G4) showed high specificity for oligomers and fibrils but did not bind to monomers. These findings suggest that most aSyn aggregate-specific antibodies cannot be used to differentiate between oligomers and fibrils, thus highlighting the importance of exercising caution when interpreting results obtained using these antibodies. In the second chapter of this thesis, we systematically addressed the current knowledge gaps on the role of aSyn oligomers in the initiation, seeding and pathology spreading. Towards this goal, we used different biophysical approaches to investigate aSyn seeding in vitro and in neurons and animal models of aSyn seeding and pathology spreading. we observed that oligomeric forms do not form in the PFF-based neuronal seeding model and we report that different types of oligomers do not seed pathology in vitro and primary hippocampal neurons, and their presence slows rather than accelerates aSyn fibrillization. Altogether, our work points to fibrils as the most seeding competent species and suggests that they are the critical mediators of pathology spreading in PD and other synucleinopathies.In the third chapter of this thesis, we used single-nuclei RNA-sequencing to investigate transcriptional changes in different cell types of the amygdala brain region, which is highly susceptible to developing pS129 positive aggregates in the PD brains. We identified that most of the top 100 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) are of neuronal rather than non-neuronal cell types. In addition, we report that the gene expression profile of a handful of PD risk genes such as Sncaip, Park7, Maob, Hspa8, Scl2a3 and Hsf3 and some pathways that have been associated with PD are differentially altered in specific cell types. Our study highlights the involvement of unique gene expression changes and their associated pathways in different cell types in driving the disease process at an early stage in a PFF-based mouse model of PD.