Temporal unsnarling of brain’s acute neuroinflammatory transcriptional profiles reveals panendothelitis as the earliest event preceding microgliosis

Abstract

Sepsis-associated encephalopathy (SAE) is an acutely progressing brain dysfunction induced by systemic inflammation. The mechanism of initiation of neuroinflammation during SAE, which ultimately leads to delirium and cognitive dysfunction, remains elusive. We aimed to study the molecular events of SAE to capture its onset and progression into the central nervous system (CNS), and further identify the cellular players involved in mediating acute inflammatory signaling. Gene expression profiling on the cerebral vessels isolated from the brains of the mice treated with peripheral lipopolysaccharide (LPS) revealed that the cerebral vasculature responds within minutes to acute systemic inflammation by upregulating the expression of immediate early response genes, followed by activation of the nuclear factor-κB pathway. To identify the earliest responding cell type, we used fluorescence-activated cell sorting (FACS) to sort the glial and vascular cells from the brains of the mice treated with LPS at different time points, and RNA-seq was performed on microglia and cerebral endothelial cells (CECs). Bioinformatic analysis followed by further validation in all the cell types revealed that panendothelitis. i.e., the activation of CECs is the earliest event in the CNS during the inception of acute neuroinflammation. Microglial activation occurs later than that of CECs, suggesting that CECs are the most likely initial source of proinflammatory mediators, which could further initiate glial cell activation. This is then followed by the activation of apoptotic signaling in the CECs, which is known to lead to the blood–brain barrier disruption and allow peripheral cytokines to leak into the CNS, exacerbate the gliosis, and result in the vicious neuroinflammatory cascade. Together, our results model the earliest sequential events during the advancement of systemic inflammation into the CNS and facilitate to understand the interplay between the vascular and glial cells in initiating and driving acute neuroinflammation during SAE.