miRNA expression in wild-type and FUS transgenic mice spinal cord and hippocampus tissues

The majority of neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s disease (AD), Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), frontotemporal dementia (FTD), and Parkinson’s disease (PD), are chronic, progressive diseases. Some instances of each disease are known to be caused by inheritance of gene mutations. Curiously, for both ALS and FTD, a proportion of incidences are caused by mutation in the gene encoding fused in sacroma, more familiarly just called FUS. It is unknown how these genetic errors in FUS cause ALS and FTD. Here, we first characterised genetic mimics in mice expressing human FUS and analyze what really goes awry so as to cause premature death of two kinds of neurons, the motor neurons and hippocampal neurons, the former links the brain to the muscles and to signal those muscles to contract and the latter is important for learning and memory by focusing on small RNAs that do not encode proteins.