Predicting chromatin signatures of dementia from peripheral blood

National Institute On Aging

Investigators

Abstract

In the past year, we have performed pilot experiments to determine the feasibility of this project. We generated single-nucleus ATAC and single-cell RNA sequencing (snATAC-seq and scRNA-seq respectively) libraries from 10 samples. For 8 out of 10 samples we used the peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) from BLSA participants while 2 normal donors were used to fractionate the PBMC into CD4+ and CD4- populations and then separately generate libraries. The latter were sequenced and analyzed. We were able to distinguish the various cell types from the cluster information. Furthermore, we performed immunophenotyping to identify cell population changes in an orthogonal technique. We are currently engaged in establishing computational methods to further analyze the data.