MAB2166 Sigma-AldrichAnti-Huntingtin Protein Antibody, a.a. 181-810, clone 1HU-4C8

Huntington's disease (HD) is caused by a CAG repeat expansion in the huntingtin (HTT) gene. Recent evidence suggests that HD is a consequence of multimodal, non-mutually exclusive mechanisms of pathogenesis that involve both HTT protein- and HTT RNA-triggered mechanisms. Here we provide further evidence for the role of expanded HTT (expHTT) RNA in HD by demonstrating that a fragment of expHTT is cytotoxic in the absence of any translation and that the extent of cytotoxicity is similar to the cytotoxicity of an expHTT protein fragment encoded by a transcript of similar length and with a similar repeat size. In addition, full-length (FL) expHTT is retained in the nucleus. Overexpression of the splicing factor muscleblind-like 1 (MBNL1) increases nuclear retention of expHTT and decreases the expression of expHTT protein in the cytosol. The splicing and nuclear export factor U2AF65 has the opposite effect, decreasing expHTT nuclear retention and increasing expression of expHTT protein. This suggests that MBNL1 and U2AF65 play a role in nuclear export of expHTT RNA.

Huntington's disease (HD) represents an important model for neurodegenerative disorders and proteinopathies. It is mainly caused by cytotoxicity of the mutant huntingtin protein (Htt) with an expanded polyQ stretch. While Htt is ubiquitously expressed, HD is characterized by selective neurodegeneration of the striatum. Here we report a striatal-enriched orphan G protein-coupled receptor(GPCR) Gpr52 as a stabilizer of Htt in vitro and in vivo. Gpr52 modulates Htt via cAMP-dependent but PKA independent mechanisms. Gpr52 is located within an intron of Rabgap1l, which exhibits epistatic effects on Gpr52-mediated modulation of Htt levels by inhibiting its substrate Rab39B, which co-localizes with Htt and translocates Htt to the endoplasmic reticulum. Finally, reducing Gpr52 suppresses HD phenotypes in both patient iPS-derived neurons and in vivo Drosophila HD models. Thus, our discovery reveals modulation of Htt levels by a striatal-enriched GPCR via its GPCR function, providing insights into the selective neurodegeneration and potential treatment strategies.

Production of protein containing lengthy stretches of polyglutamine encoded by multiple repeats of the trinucleotide CAG is a hallmark of Huntington's disease (HD) and of a variety of other inherited degenerative neurological and neuromuscular disorders. Earlier work has shown that interference with production of the transcription elongation protein SUPT4H results in decreased cellular capacity to transcribe mutant huntingtin gene (Htt) alleles containing long CAG expansions, but has little effect on expression of genes containing short CAG stretches. zQ175 and R6/2 are genetically engineered mouse strains whose genomes contain human HTT alleles that include greatly expanded CAG repeats and which are used as animal models for HD. Here we show that reduction of SUPT4H expression in brains of zQ175 mice by intracerebroventricular bolus injection of antisense 2'-O-methoxyethyl oligonucleotides (ASOs) directed against Supt4h, or in R6/2 mice by deletion of one copy of the Supt4h gene, results in a decrease in mRNA and protein encoded specifically by mutant Htt alleles. We further show that reduction of SUPT4H in mouse brains is associated with decreased HTT protein aggregation, and in R6/2 mice, also with prolonged lifespan and delay of the motor impairment that normally develops in these animals. Our findings support the view that targeting of SUPT4H function may be useful as a therapeutic countermeasure against HD.

Huntington disease (HD) is a brain disorder characterized by the late onset of motor and cognitive symptoms, even though the neurons in the brain begin to suffer dysfunction and degeneration long before symptoms appear. There is currently no cure. Several molecular and developmental effects of HD have been identified using neural stem cells (NSCs) and differentiated cells, such as neurons and astrocytes. Still, little is known regarding the molecular pathogenesis of HD in pluripotent cells, such as embryonic stem cells (ESCs) and induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). Therefore, we examined putative signaling pathways and processes involved in HD pathogenesis in pluripotent cells. We tested naïve mouse HD YAC128 iPSCs and two types of human HD iPSC that were generated from HD and juvenile-HD patients. Surprisingly, we found that a number of changes affecting cellular processes in HD were also present in undifferentiated pluripotent HD iPSCs, including the dysregulation of the MAPK and Wnt signaling pathways and the dysregulation of the expression of genes related to oxidative stress, such as Sod1. Interestingly, a common protein interactor of the huntingtin protein and the proteins in the above pathways is p53, and the expression of p53 was dysregulated in HD YAC128 iPSCs and human HD iPSCs. In summary, our findings demonstrate that multiple molecular pathways that are characteristically dysregulated in HD are already altered in undifferentiated pluripotent cells and that the pathogenesis of HD might begin during the early stages of life.

Huntingtin (Htt) is a 350 kD intracellular protein, ubiquitously expressed and mainly localized in the cytoplasm. Huntington's disease (HD) is caused by a CAG triplet amplification in exon 1 of the corresponding gene resulting in a polyglutamine (polyQ) expansion at the N-terminus of Htt. Production of full-length Htt has been difficult in the past and so far a scalable system or process has not been established for recombinant production of Htt in human cells. The ability to produce Htt in milligram quantities would be a prerequisite for many biochemical and biophysical studies aiming in a better understanding of Htt function under physiological conditions and in case of mutation and disease. For scalable production of full-length normal (17Q) and mutant (46Q and 128Q) Htt we have established two different systems, the first based on doxycycline-inducible Htt expression in stable cell lines, the second on "gutless" adenovirus mediated gene transfer. Purified material has then been used for biochemical characterization of full-length Htt. Posttranslational modifications (PTMs) were determined and several new phosphorylation sites were identified. Nearly all PTMs in full-length Htt localized to areas outside of predicted alpha-solenoid protein regions. In all detected N-terminal peptides methionine as the first amino acid was missing and the second, alanine, was found to be acetylated. Differences in secondary structure between normal and mutant Htt, a helix-rich protein, were not observed in our study. Purified Htt tends to form dimers and higher order oligomers, thus resembling the situation observed with N-terminal fragments, although the mechanism of oligomer formation may be different.

Quantitation of huntingtin protein in the brain is needed, both as a marker of Huntington disease (HD) progression and for use in clinical gene silencing trials. Measurement of huntingtin in cerebrospinal fluid could be a biomarker of brain huntingtin, but traditional protein quantitation methods have failed to detect huntingtin in cerebrospinal fluid. Using micro-bead based immunoprecipitation and flow cytometry (IP-FCM), we have developed a highly sensitive mutant huntingtin detection assay. The sensitivity of huntingtin IP-FCM enables accurate detection of mutant huntingtin protein in the cerebrospinal fluid of HD patients and model mice, demonstrating that mutant huntingtin levels in cerebrospinal fluid reflect brain levels, increasing with disease stage and decreasing following brain huntingtin suppression. This technique has potential applications as a research tool and as a clinical biomarker.

Huntington disease is an adult onset neurodegenerative disease characterized by motor, cognitive, and psychiatric dysfunction, caused by a CAG expansion in the HTT gene. Huntingtin Interacting Protein 14 (HIP14) and Huntingtin Interacting Protein 14-like (HIP14L) are palmitoyl acyltransferases (PATs), enzymes that mediate the post-translational addition of long chain fatty acids to proteins in a process called palmitoylation. HIP14 and HIP14L interact with and palmitoylate HTT and are unique among PATs as they are the only two that have an ankyrin repeat domain, which mediates the interaction between HIP14 and HTT. These enzymes show reduced interaction with and palmitoylation of mutant HTT, leading to increased mutant HTT inclusion formation and toxicity. The interaction between HIP14 and HTT goes beyond that of only an enzyme-substrate interaction as HTT is essential for the full enzymatic activity of HIP14. It is important to further understand and characterize the interactions of HTT with HIP14 and HIP14L to guide future efforts to target and enhance this interaction and increase enzyme activity to remediate palmitoylation of HTT and their substrates, as well as to understand the relationship between the three proteins. HIP14 and HIP14L have been previously shown to interact with HTT amino acids 1-548. Here the interaction of HIP14 and HIP14L with N- and C-terminal HTT 1-548 deletion mutations was assessed. We show that HTT amino acids 1-548 were sufficient for full interaction of HTT with HIP14 and HIP14L, but partial interaction was also possible with HTT 1-427 and HTT 224-548. To further characterize the binding domain we assessed the interaction of HIP14-GFP and HIP14L-GFP with 15Q HTT 1-548Δ257-315. Both enzymes showed reduced but not abolished interaction with 15Q HTT 1-548Δ257-315. This suggests that two potential binding domains exist, one around residues 224 and the other around 427, for the PAT enzymes HIP14 and HIP14L.

Autophagy is an essential cellular pathway for degrading defective organelles and aggregated proteins. Defects in autophagy have been implicated in the neurodegenerative disorder Huntington's disease (HD), in which polyglutamine-expanded huntingtin (polyQ-htt) is predominantly cleared by autophagy. In neurons, autophagosomes form constitutively at the axon tip and undergo robust retrograde axonal transport toward the cell body, but the factors regulating autophagosome dynamics and autophagosome maturation are not well understood. Here, we show that both huntingtin (htt) and its adaptor protein huntingtin-associated protein-1 (HAP1) copurify and colocalize with autophagosomes in neurons. We use live-cell imaging and RNAi in primary neurons from GFP-LC3 transgenic mice to show that htt and HAP1 control autophagosome dynamics, regulating dynein and kinesin motors to promote processive transport. Expression of polyQ-htt in either primary neurons or striatal cells from HD knock-in mice is sufficient to disrupt the axonal transport of autophagosomes. Htt is not required for autophagosome formation or cargo loading. However, the defective autophagosome transport observed in both htt-depleted neurons and polyQ-htt-expressing neurons is correlated with inefficient degradation of engulfed mitochondrial fragments. Together, these studies identify htt and HAP1 as regulators of autophagosome transport in neurons and suggest that misregulation of autophagosome transport in HD leads to inefficient autophagosome maturation, potentially due to inhibition of autophagosome/lysosome fusion along the axon. The resulting defective clearance of both polyQ-htt aggregates and dysfunctional mitochondria by neuronal autophagosomes may contribute to neurodegeneration and cell death in HD.

The expansion of a CAG trinucleotide repeat in the huntingtin gene, which produces huntingtin protein with an expanded polyglutamine tract, is the cause of Huntington's disease (HD). Recent studies have reported that RNAi suppression of polyglutamine-expanded huntingtin (mutant HTT) in HD animal models can ameliorate disease phenotypes. A key requirement for such preclinical studies, as well as eventual clinical trials, aimed to reduce mutant HTT exposure is a robust method to measure HTT protein levels in select tissues. We have developed several sensitive and selective assays that measure either total human HTT or polyglutamine-expanded human HTT proteins on the electrochemiluminescence Meso Scale Discovery detection platform with an increased dynamic range over other methods. In addition, we have developed an assay to detect endogenous mouse and rat HTT proteins in pre-clinical models of HD to monitor effects on the wild type protein of both allele selective and non-selective interventions. We demonstrate the application of these assays to measure HTT protein in several HD in vitro cellular and in vivo animal model systems as well as in HD patient biosamples. Furthermore, we used purified recombinant HTT proteins as standards to quantitate the absolute amount of HTT protein in such biosamples.

In Huntington's disease, expansion of a CAG triplet repeat occurs in exon 1 of the huntingtin gene (HTT), resulting in a protein bearinggreater than 35 polyglutamine residues whose N-terminal fragments display a high propensity to misfold and aggregate. Recent data demonstrate that polyglutamine expansion results in conformational changes in the huntingtin protein (HTT), which likely influence its biological and biophysical properties. Developing assays to characterize and measure these conformational changes in isolated proteins and biological samples would advance the testing of novel therapeutic approaches aimed at correcting mutant HTT misfolding. Time-resolved Förster energy transfer (TR-FRET)-based assays represent high-throughput, homogeneous, sensitive immunoassays widely employed for the quantification of proteins of interest. TR-FRET is extremely sensitive to small distances and can therefore provide conformational information based on detection of exposure and relative position of epitopes present on the target protein as recognized by selective antibodies. We have previously reported TR-FRET assays to quantify HTT proteins based on the use of antibodies specific for different amino-terminal HTT epitopes. Here, we investigate the possibility of interrogating HTT protein conformation using these assays.By performing TR-FRET measurements on the same samples (purified recombinant proteins or lysates from cells expressing HTT fragments or full length protein) at different temperatures, we have discovered a temperature-dependent, reversible, polyglutamine-dependent conformational change of wild type and expanded mutant HTT proteins. Circular dichroism spectroscopy confirms the temperature and polyglutamine-dependent change in HTT structure, revealing an effect of polyglutamine length and of temperature on the alpha-helical content of the protein.The temperature- and polyglutamine-dependent effects observed with TR-FRET on HTT proteins represent a simple, scalable, quantitative and sensitive assay to identify genetic and pharmacological modulators of mutant HTT conformation, and potentially to assess the relevance of conformational changes during onset and progression of Huntington's disease.