Cell-type-informed genotyping of mosaic focal epilepsies reveals cell-autonomous and non-cell-autonomous disease-associated transcriptional programs

Abstract

While it is widely accepted that somatic variants that activate the PI3K-mTOR pathway are a major cause of drug-resistant focal epilepsy, typically associated with focal cortical dysplasia (FCD) type 2, understanding the mechanism of epileptogenesis requires identifying genotype-associated changes at the single-cell level, which is technically challenging with existing methods. Here, we performed single-nucleus RNA-sequencing (snRNA-seq) of 18 FCD type 2 samples removed surgically for treatment of drug-resistant epilepsy, and 17 non-FCD control samples, and analyzed additional published data comprising >400,000 single nuclei. We also performed simultaneous single-nucleus genotyping and gene ..