The effects of postmortem delay on mouse microglia gene expression

Microglia are specialized macrophages of the central nervous system (CNS) and first to react to pathogens or injury. Transcriptional profiling significantly contributed to our understanding of microglia functions. In the case of human CNS samples, a postmortem delay (PMD) in tissue access and collection is the potential factor that might affect microglia gene expression profiles. However, the direct analysis of effects of PMD on human microglia transcriptome is challenging due to many confounding factors such as sex, aging, nutrition, lifestyle, medication and medical history. To determine the effects of PMD on the microglia transcriptome. Here, we analyzed mouse microglia, where ante-mortem conditions and post-mortem delay can be tightly controlled. PMD had very limited effect on mouse microglia gene expression, only 50 genes (out of 15,554 detected genes) were differentially expressed between different PMDs. 4 experimental groups with different postmortem intervals (0, 4, 6, 12 h), with 4 replicates per group. In total, 16 mouse samples for bulk RNAseq.