Epilepsy miRNA Profile Depends on the Age of Onset in Humans and Rats

Jiri Baloun; Petra Bencurova; Tereza Totkova; Hana Kubova; Marketa Hermanova; Michal Hendrych; Martin Pail; Sarka Pospisilova; Milan Brazdil

doi:10.3389/fnins.2020.00924

Epilepsy miRNA Profile Depends on the Age of Onset in Humans and Rats

Front Neurosci. 2020 Sep 15:14:924. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2020.00924. eCollection 2020.

Authors

Jiri Baloun¹, Petra Bencurova^{1

2}, Tereza Totkova¹, Hana Kubova³, Marketa Hermanova⁴, Michal Hendrych⁴, Martin Pail², Sarka Pospisilova¹, Milan Brazdil^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ Central European Institute of Technology, Masaryk University, Brno, Czechia.
² Brno Epilepsy Center, Department of Neurology, Medical Faculty of Masaryk University, St. Anne's University Hospital, Brno, Czechia.
³ Department of Developmental Epileptology, Institute of Physiology of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, Czechia.
⁴ First Department of Pathology, Medical Faculty of Masaryk University, St. Anne's University Hospital, Brno, Czechia.

Abstract

Temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) is a severe neurological disorder accompanied by recurrent spontaneous seizures. Although the knowledge of TLE onset is still incomplete, TLE pathogenesis most likely involves the aberrant expression of microRNAs (miRNAs). miRNAs play an essential role in organism homeostasis and are widely studied in TLE as potential therapeutics and biomarkers. However, many discrepancies in discovered miRNAs occur among TLE studies due to model-specific miRNA expression, different onset ages of epilepsy among patients, or technology-related bias. We employed a massive parallel sequencing approach to analyze brain tissues from 16 adult mesial TLE (mTLE)/hippocampal sclerosis (HS) patients, 8 controls and 20 rats with TLE-like syndrome, and 20 controls using the same workflow and categorized these subjects based on the age of epilepsy onset. All categories were compared to discover overlapping miRNAs with an aberrant expression, which could be involved in TLE. Our cross-comparative analyses showed distinct miRNA profiles across the age of epilepsy onset and found that the miRNA profile in rats with adult-onset TLE shows the closest resemblance to the profile in mTLE/HS patients. Additionally, this analysis revealed overlapping miRNAs between patients and the rat model, which should participate in epileptogenesis and ictogenesis. Among the overlapping miRNAs stand out miR-142-5p and miR-142-3p, which regulate immunomodulatory agents with pro-convulsive effects and suppress neuronal growth. Our cross-comparison study enhanced the insight into the effect of the age of epilepsy onset on miRNA expression and deepened the knowledge of epileptogenesis. We employed the same methodological workflow in both patients and the rat model, thus improving the reliability and accuracy of our results.

Keywords: animal model; cross-comparison study; human; mesial temporal lobe epilepsy; miRNA; sequencing.