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University of Washington Cerebrospinal Fluid Biomarker Study for Parkinson disease

There is a clear need to develop biomarkers for Parkinson disease (PD) diagnosis and monitoring disease progression. In this study we evaluated cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) proteins, which are known to be critically involved in PD or identified in our preliminary profiling studies, aptamers, and RNAs as potential PD biomarkers. Access to subjects for this study was via the Pacific Northwest Udall Center (PANUC) and the Alzheimer's Disease Research Center (ADRC) at the University of Washington and Oregon Health and Sciences University (OHSU). Using CSF samples from 30 well-characterized patients with PD and 30 age-, sex-matched healthy controls, we prepared RNA seq libraries and performed deep sequencing of all RNA species, including small and long RNA, mRNAs, noncoding RNAs and differentially spliced transcripts. We then tried several methods for RNAseq data analysis to optimize our analysis pipeline. We identified a total of 3381 transcripts corresponding to 182 long intergenic RNAs (LincRNAs), 11 microRNAs (miRNAs), 2861 protein-coding transcripts, 200 pseudogenes and 127 antisense RNAs; some of them were differentially expressed between PD and control groups. Selected differentially expressed RNAs have been validated in the same set of CSF samples using real-time PCR (RT-PCR). Further validations in independent, larger cohorts of samples are still ongoing. Our results obtained so far suggested that CSF proteins and RNAs could be used as good indexes for PD diagnosis and disease severity/progression. This study is a part of the NIDDS-funded Parkinson's Disease Biomarkers Program (PDBP).