The effect of freezing delay of cell-type specific transcriptome responses in human brain via snRNA-seq

In other analysis in the current manuscript, we find a similar gene signature (to dissociation based artifacts in mouse and human tissue) is present in post-mortem microglia and astrocytes, across all snRNA-seq datasets analyzed, although it is highly variable between subjects. ​ Using acutely-resected neurosurgical tissue, we performed single-nucleus RNA-seq and reveal that a similar signature can be detected in microglia following prolonged exposure to room temperature. Tissue handling and methods details, as well as sequencing and analysis details) can be found in the methods section of related manuscript (Marsh et al., 2022). Together, these results suggest that the presence of this signature in post-mortem brain samples may be the result of a combination of acute pre-mortem (agonal state, cause of death, comorbidities, etc.) and post-mortem (post-mortem interval (PMI), storage time, RNA quality, etc.) variables and may not represent normally present cell state.

• 4 samples
• DAC: EGAC00001000205
• Technology: Illumina NovaSeq 6000