Role of the glial glutamate exchanger xCT in ventral hippocampus in resilience to stress

We demonstrate that stress differentially regulates glutamate homeostasis in the dorsal and ventral hippocampus and established a previously unknown role for the glial marker xCT in the homeostatic regulation of the ventral dentate gyrus (vDG) in stress resilience and antidepressant responses. We provide RNAseq roadmap for the stress-sensitive vDG and show that the transcription factor REST binds to xCT promoter in co-occupancy with the epigenetic marker H3K27acet, to negatively regulate xCT expression. Reduced xCT was also observed in a genetic mouse model of inherent susceptibility to depression. Pharmacologically modulating histone acetylation with next-generation therapeutics, such as acetyl-N-cysteine (NAC) or acetyl-L-carnitine (LAC), rapidly increased xCT reduction and activated a network that included mGlu2 receptors to prime an enhanced glutamate homeostasis that promoted stress resilience and antidepressant-like responses. Moreover, pharmacological xCT blockage counteracted NAC prophylactic effects. Anatomical (vDG) and cell-type specific (GFAP+) virus-overexpression mimicked the effects of pharmacological treatments in increasing stress resilience. These findings establish xCT as critical regulator of the glutamate system in a network with mGlu2 receptors. These studies also point to a role of histone acetylation as mediator of stress resilience. Ventral dentate gyrus RNA from 3 biological replicates per group (Not-stressed Controls or Ctrl and Chronic Restrained Stress or CRS, all male mice) was used for library prep (TruSeq Stranded Total RNA with Ribo-Zero Human/Mouse/Rat) and sequenced on Illumina HiSeq2500 at the Genomic Core facility at The Rockefeller University. Each sample was provided with a unique adapter and all samples were put in the same pool and run in multiple lanes to control for lane effects with a sequencing depth of about 30M (100bp, single end).