Genomic, transcriptomic and RNA editing analysis of human MM1 and VV2 sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease

Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) is characterized by a broad phenotypic spectrum regarding symptoms, progression, and molecular features. Current sporadic CJD (sCJD) classification recognizes six main clinical-pathological phenotypes. This work investigates the molecular basis of the phenotypic heterogeneity of prion diseases through a multi-omics analysis of the two most common sCJD subtypes: MM1 and VV2. We performed DNA target sequencing on 118 genes on a cohort of 48 CJD patients and full exome RNA sequencing on post-mortem frontal cortex tissue on a subset of this cohort. DNA target sequencing identified multiple potential genetic contributors to the disease onset and phenotype, both in terms of coding, damaging-predicted variants, and enriched groups of SNPs in the whole cohort and the two subtypes. The results highlight a different functional impairment, with VV2 associated with higher impairment of the pathways related to dopamine secretion, regulation of calcium release and GABA signaling, showing some similarities with Parkinson’s disease both on a genomic and a transcriptomic level. MM1 showed a gene expression profile with several traits shared with different neurodegenerative, without an apparent distinctive characteristic or similarities with a specific disease. In addition, integrating genomic and transcriptomic data led to the discovery of several sites of ADAR-mediated RNA editing events, confirming and expanding previous findings in animal models. On the transcriptomic level, this work represents the first application of RNA sequencing on CJD human brain samples. Here, a good clusterization of the transcriptomic profiles of the two subtypes was achieved, together with the finding of several differently impaired pathways between the two subtypes. The results add to the understanding of the molecular features associated with sporadic CJD and its most common subtypes, revealing strain-specific genetic signatures and functional similarities between VV2 and Parkinson’s disease and providing preliminary evidence of RNA editing modifications in human sCJD. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s40478-022-01483-9.