Identifying Cell Population Heterogeneity in Cerebral Palsy Muscle

Abstract

Cerebral Palsy (CP) is a neuromuscular condition that affects movement and muscle tone, and often leads to contractures. Muscle satellite cells (MuSCs) have been shown to decrease in CP, but the overall resident muscle cell populations have not been characterized. Our objective is to identify differences in the cell populations and transcriptomes of muscle biopsies taken from CP and typically developing patients (TD) using single cell RNA sequencing. We hypothesize that cells taken from CP patient muscle will have a different distribution amongst populations. Gene enrichment, psuedotime analysis, subclustering, and interactome analysis were conducted to investigate muscle resident cell populations. The results demonstrated that, while there was not a significant disparity between cell populations of CP and TD muscle, there were differences in the subpopulations of MuSCs and fibro-adipogenic progenitors (FAPs). These results indicate that FAPs from CP patients tend to be more pro-fibrotic and may signal to MuSCs to undergo apoptosis. This study may help to identify molecular and cellular targets for CP therapies. Funding provided by the Hartwell Foundation. This is the full abstract presented at the American Physiology Summit 2024 meeting and is only available in HTML format. There are no additional versions or additional content available for this abstract. Physiology was not involved in the peer review process.