Affiliations 

  • 1 Department of Physiology, Faculty of Medicine, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur 50603, Malaysia
  • 2 School of Clinical Sciences, University of Bristol, Bristol BS1 3NY, United Kingdom
  • 3 Department of Engineering Mathematics, University of Bristol, Bristol BS8 1UB, United Kingdom
eNeuro, 2017 12 21;4(6).
PMID: 29279858 DOI: 10.1523/ENEURO.0243-17.2017

Abstract

The supraoptic nucleus (SON) is a group of neurons in the hypothalamus responsible for the synthesis and secretion of the peptide hormones vasopressin and oxytocin. Following physiological cues, such as dehydration, salt-loading and lactation, the SON undergoes a function related plasticity that we have previously described in the rat at the transcriptome level. Using the unsupervised graphical lasso (Glasso) algorithm, we reconstructed a putative network from 500 plastic SON genes in which genes are the nodes and the edges are the inferred interactions. The most active nodal gene identified within the network was Caprin2. Caprin2 encodes an RNA-binding protein that we have previously shown to be vital for the functioning of osmoregulatory neuroendocrine neurons in the SON of the rat hypothalamus. To test the validity of the Glasso network, we either overexpressed or knocked down Caprin2 transcripts in differentiated rat pheochromocytoma PC12 cells and showed that these manipulations had significant opposite effects on the levels of putative target mRNAs. These studies suggest that the predicative power of the Glasso algorithm within an in vivo system is accurate, and identifies biological targets that may be important to the functional plasticity of the SON.

* Title and MeSH Headings from MEDLINE®/PubMed®, a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.