Astroglial Ezh2 regulates early astrocyte morphogenesis and affects the coverage of astrocyte endfeet on blood vessels

To further investigate how Ezh2 derived from cortical astrocytes regulates cell morphology, RNA-seq analysis was performed to examine transcriptomic changes in cortical astrocytes isolated from Ezh2 conditional knockout mice and wild-type littermates at P5. Approximately 4,900 transcripts exhibited differential expression between Ezh2fl/fl and Ezh2-cKO-Aldh1l1 mouse cortical astrocytes, with a fold change =2 and a p-value <0.05. After further screening of the highly expressed gene subset among the differentially expressed genes, we found that the upregulated genes were enriched in processes related to gliogenesis, cell differentiation, and cytoskeletal organization. These findings highlight the critical role of astrocytic Ezh2 in the morphological development of astrocytes. Overall design: Astrocytes were isolated from the cerebral cortex of Ezh2fl/fl and Ezh2-cKO-Aldh1l1 mice at P5 by magnetic bead sorting (ACSA1-anti), and mRNA was extracted. Separately, including 4 samples of WT1/WT2/cKO1/cKO2 (W1/W2/C1/C2). Agilent 2100 Bioanalyze was used to quality controlled and quantified. Then, mRNA was converted to cDNA and the library was constructed. RNA sequencing analysis was performed using the Illumina HiSeq 2500 platform of Annolog Genomics.