Ndufs4-knockout mouse with mitochondria complex I inhibitor treatment

Glucose hypometabolism is one of the major characteristics of Alzheimer's disease (AD). The energy deficiency in AD brain has been at least partially attributed to accelerated mitochondrial dysfunction than normal aging. In earlier publications, we have shown that small molecule mitochondrial complex I inhibitor CP2 facilitated mitochondrial regeneration and rescued mitochondrial deficiency in familial AD mice model APP-PS1. Here in this study, we investigated whether a typical mitochondrial deficiency mouse model could recapitulate molecular expression signatures of AD brain and whether CP2 was able to rescue the AD brain phenotype. Ndufs4 is one of the regulatory subunits of mitochondria complex I. Knockout of Ndufs4 resulted in complex I assembly failure and approximately half mitochondrial function loss. Ndufs4-knockout mice are viable but are short in lifespan (up to about 90 days). This model has been previously used to study Leigh syndrome, a heritable mitochondrial deficiency disease. In this dataset, we performed RNAseq on brains of CP2 treated Ndufs4-knockout mice and examined the expression changes upon CP2 treatment. Ndufs4-knockout and WT mice of 37-45 days old were gavage fed with CP2 or vehicle for 3 consecutive days. At the end of third day of gavage feeding, mice were sacrificed and hippocampus and cortex brain tissue was quickly collected for RNA isolation.