Exploitable, highly context-specific astrocytes

To investigate the functional heterogeneity of astrocytes from a defined brain region, we designed 12 experimental manipulations including Huntington's disease models, pathological challenges, ionic and GPCR signaling alterations, and analyzed the transcriptomic profiles of striatal astrocytes. From the analyses, we have identified context-specific changes of striatal astrocytes. Overall design: Total 80 samples from 40 adult mice were used in this data set. Astrocyte RiboTag AAV was injected into the striatum to extract RNA specifically from striatal astrocytes. We designed several manipulations to ablate MSNs by quinolinic acid (QA), to induce neuroinflammation by lipopolysaccharide (LPS), to reduce potassium and calcium signals and to activate Gs-GPCR pathway in striatal astrocytes. After tissue homogenization, RNA was purified from (i) cleared lysate as the input sample, and (ii) astrocyte-specific ribosome-associated RNA precipitated via a hemagglutinin (HA) tag as the IP sample.