Cell lineage-specific mitochondrial resilience during mammalian organogenesis

Mitochondrial activity differs markedly between organs, but it is not known how and when this arises. Here we show that cell lineage-specific expression profiles involving essential mitochondrial genes emerge at an early stage in mouse development, including tissue-specific isoforms present before organ formation. However, the nuclear transcriptional signatures were not independent of organelle function. Genetically disrupting intra-mitochondrial protein synthesis with two different mtDNA mutations induced cell lineage-specific compensatory responses, including molecular pathways not previously implicated in organellar maintenance. We saw downregulation of genes whose expression is known to exacerbate the effects of exogenous mitochondrial toxins, indicating a transcriptional adaptation to mitochondrial dysfunction during embryonic development. The compensatory pathways were both tissue and mutation specific and under the control of transcription factors which promote organelle resilience. These are likely to contribute to the tissue specificity which characterizes human mitochondrial diseases and are potential targets for organ-directed treatments.

Quantifying the 'end of history' through a Bayesian Markov-chain approach

Political regimes have been changing throughout human history. After the apparent triumph of liberal democracies at the end of the twentieth century, Francis Fukuyama and others have been arguing that humankind is approaching an 'end of history' (EoH) in the form of a universality of liberal democracies. This view has been challenged by recent developments that seem to indicate the rise of defective democracies across the globe. There has been no attempt to quantify the expected EoH with a statistical approach. In this study, we model the transition between political regimes as a Markov process and-using a Bayesian inference approach-we estimate the transition probabilities between political regimes from time-series data describing the evolution of political regimes from 1800 to 2018. We then compute the steady state for this Markov process which represents a mathematical abstraction of the EoH and predicts that approximately 46% of countries will be full democracies. Furthermore, we find that, under our model, the fraction of autocracies in the world is expected to increase for the next half-century before it declines. Using random-walk theory, we then estimate survival curves of different types of regimes and estimate characteristic lifetimes of democracies and autocracies of 244 years and 69 years, respectively. Quantifying the expected EoH allows us to challenge common beliefs about the nature of political equilibria. Specifically, we find no statistical evidence that the EoH constitutes a fixed, complete omnipresence of democratic regimes.

Topological data analysis of truncated contagion maps

The investigation of dynamical processes on networks has been one focus for the study of contagion processes. It has been demonstrated that contagions can be used to obtain information about the embedding of nodes in a Euclidean space. Specifically, one can use the activation times of threshold contagions to construct contagion maps as a manifold-learning approach. One drawback of contagion maps is their high computational cost. Here, we demonstrate that a truncation of the threshold contagions may considerably speed up the construction of contagion maps. Finally, we show that contagion maps may be used to find an insightful low-dimensional embedding for single-cell RNA-sequencing data in the form of cell-similarity networks and so reveal biological manifolds. Overall, our work makes the use of contagion maps as manifold-learning approaches on empirical network data more viable.

Mitochondrial DNA heteroplasmy is modulated during oocyte development propagating mutation transmission

Heteroplasmic mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) mutations are a common cause of inherited disease, but a few recurrent mutations account for the vast majority of new families. The reasons for this are not known. We studied heteroplasmic mice transmitting m.5024C>T corresponding to a human pathogenic mutation. Analyzing 1167 mother-pup pairs, we show that m.5024C>T is preferentially transmitted from low to higher levels but does not reach homoplasmy. Single-cell analysis of the developing mouse oocytes showed the preferential increase in mutant over wild-type mtDNA in the absence of cell division. A similar inheritance pattern is seen in human pedigrees transmitting several pathogenic mtDNA mutations. In m.5024C>T mice, this can be explained by the preferential propagation of mtDNA during oocyte maturation, counterbalanced by purifying selection against high heteroplasmy levels. This could explain how a disadvantageous mutation in a carrier increases to levels that cause disease but fails to fixate, causing multigenerational heteroplasmic mtDNA disorders.

Functional module detection through integration of single-cell RNA sequencing data with protein-protein interaction networks

Background

Recent advances in single-cell RNA sequencing have allowed researchers to explore transcriptional function at a cellular level. In particular, single-cell RNA sequencing reveals that there exist clusters of cells with similar gene expression profiles, representing different transcriptional states.

Results

In this study, we present scPPIN, a method for integrating single-cell RNA sequencing data with protein–protein interaction networks that detects active modules in cells of different transcriptional states. We achieve this by clustering RNA-sequencing data, identifying differentially expressed genes, constructing node-weighted protein–protein interaction networks, and finding the maximum-weight connected subgraphs with an exact Steiner-tree approach. As case studies, we investigate two RNA-sequencing data sets from human liver spheroids and human adipose tissue, respectively. With scPPIN we expand the output of differential expressed genes analysis with information from protein interactions. We find that different transcriptional states have different subnetworks of the protein–protein interaction networks significantly enriched which represent biological pathways. In these pathways, scPPIN identifies proteins that are not differentially expressed but have a crucial biological function (e.g., as receptors) and therefore reveals biology beyond a standard differential expressed gene analysis.

Conclusions

The introduced scPPIN method can be used to systematically analyse differentially expressed genes in single-cell RNA sequencing data by integrating it with protein interaction data. The detected modules that characterise each cluster help to identify and hypothesise a biological function associated to those cells. Our analysis suggests the participation of unexpected proteins in these pathways that are undetectable from the single-cell RNA sequencing data alone. The techniques described here are applicable to other organisms and tissues.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at (doi:10.1186/s12864-020-07144-2).

Comparing two classes of biological distribution systems using network analysis

Distribution networks-from vasculature to urban transportation pathways-are spatially embedded networks that must route resources efficiently in the face of pressures induced by the costs of building and maintaining network infrastructure. Such requirements are thought to constrain the topological and spatial organization of these systems, but at the same time, different kinds of distribution networks may exhibit variable architectural features within those general constraints. In this study, we use methods from network science to compare and contrast two classes of biological transport networks: mycelial fungi and vasculature from the surface of rodent brains. These systems differ in terms of their growth and transport mechanisms, as well as the environments in which they typically exist. Though both types of networks have been studied independently, the goal of this study is to quantify similarities and differences in their network designs. We begin by characterizing the structural backbone of these systems with a collection of measures that assess various kinds of network organization across topological and spatial scales, ranging from measures of loop density, to those that quantify connected pathways between different network regions, and hierarchical organization. Most importantly, we next carry out a network analysis that directly considers the spatial embedding and properties especially relevant to the function of distribution systems. We find that although both the vasculature and mycelia are highly constrained planar networks, there are clear distinctions in how they balance tradeoffs in network measures of wiring length, efficiency, and robustness. While the vasculature appears well organized for low cost, but relatively high efficiency, the mycelia tend to form more expensive but in turn more robust networks. As a whole, this work demonstrates the utility of network-based methods to identify both common features and variations in the network structure of different classes of biological transport systems.

Rentian scaling for the measurement of optimal embedding of complex networks into physical space

The London Underground is one of the largest, oldest and most widely used systems of public transit in the world. Transportation in London is constantly challenged to expand and adapt its system to meet the changing requirements of London's populace while maintaining a cost-effective and efficient network. Previous studies have described this system using concepts from graph theory, reporting network diagnostics and core-periphery architecture. These studies provide information about the basic structure and efficiency of this network; however, the question of system optimization in the context of evolving demands is seldom investigated. In this paper we examined the cost effectiveness of the topological-physical embedding of the Tube using estimations of the topological dimension, wiring length and Rentian scaling, an isometric scaling relationship between the number of elements and connections in a system. We measured these properties in both two- and three-dimensional embeddings of the networks into Euclidean space, as well as between two time points, and across the densely interconnected core and sparsely interconnected periphery. While the two- and three-dimensional representations of the present-day Tube exhibit Rentian scaling relationships between nodes and edges of the system, the overall network is approximately cost-efficiently embedded into its physical environment in two dimensions, but not in three. We further investigated a notable disparity in the topology of the network's local core versus its more extended periphery, suggesting an underlying relationship between meso-scale structure and physical embedding. The collective findings from this study, including changes in Rentian scaling over time, provide evidence for differential embedding efficiency in planned versus self-organized networks. These findings suggest that concepts of optimal physical embedding can be applied more broadly to other physical systems whose links are embedded in a well-defined space, and whose topology is constrained by a cost function that minimizes link lengths within that space.