Glia-specific nuclei isolation and single cell transcriptomics inform astrocyte pathology in human temporal lobe epilepsy

The role of human glia in many neurological disorders is still poorly understood due to the lack of tools that reliably isolate specific glial subpopulations from bulk tissue, directly from their native niche. To better understand the contributions of glial pathology in human epilepsy, we developed and validated a novel sorting strategy that simultaneously isolates nuclei populations of astrocytes (PAX6+), oligodendroglial progenitors (OPCs) (OLIG2+) and neurons (NEUN+) from non-pathological fresh-frozen human postmortem temporal neocortex brain tissue (TL Control) and then employed it, in combination with single cell RNA-seq, to characterize the cell-type specific transcriptome alterations in epilepsy temporal neocortex derived from fresh surgical material in patients with medically refractory temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE). Overall design: Analysis of cell-type specific transcriptome changes in human temporal lobe epilepsy generated from cell-type-specific nuclei populations and single cells