Expression data for inbred mouse brains

Prion diseases are fatal neurodegenerative disorders that include bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) and scrapie in animals and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) in humans. They are characterized by long incubation periods, variation in which is determined by many factors including genetic background. In some cases it is possible that incubation time may be directly correlated to the level of gene expression. In order to test this hypothesis we combined incubation time data from five different inbred lines of mice with quantitative gene expression profiling in normal brains and identified five genes with expression levels that correlate with incubation time. One of these genes, Hspa13 (Stch), is a member of the Hsp70 family of ATPase heat shock proteins which have been previously implicated in prion propagation. To test whether Hspa13 plays a causal role in determining the incubation period we tested two over-expressing mouse models. The Tc1 human chromosome 21 (Hsa21) transchromosomic mouse model of Down syndrome is trisomic for many Hsa21 genes including Hspa13 and following Chandler/RML prion inoculation shows a 4% reduction in incubation time. Furthermore, a transgenic model with eight fold over-expression of mouse Hspa13 exhibited highly significant reductions in incubation time of 16%, 15% and 7% following infection with Chandler/RML, ME7 and MRC2 prion strains respectively. These data further implicate Hsp70-like molecular chaperones in protein misfolding disorders such as prion disease. 5 inbred lines of mice, 5 samples for each line