Endothelial TDP-43 depletion disrupts core blood–brain barrier pathways in neurodegeneration

Abstract

Endothelial cells (ECs) help maintain the blood–brain barrier but deteriorate in many neurodegenerative disorders. Here we show, using a specialized method to isolate EC and microglial nuclei from postmortem human cortex (92 donors, 50 male and 42 female, aged 20–98 years), that intranuclear cellular indexing of transcriptomes and epitopes enables simultaneous profiling of nuclear proteins and RNA transcripts at a single-nucleus resolution. We identify a disease-associated subset of capillary ECs in Alzheimer’s disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and frontotemporal degeneration. These capillaries exhibit reduced nuclear β-catenin and β-catenin-downstream genes, along with elevated TNF/NF-κB markers. Notably, these transcriptional changes correlate with the loss of nuclear TDP-43, an RNA-binding protein also depleted in neuronal nuclei. TDP-43 disruption in human and mouse ECs replicates these alterations, suggesting that TDP-43 deficiency in ECs is an important factor contributing to blood–brain barrier breakdown in neurodegenerative diseases.