General anesthetic action profile on the human prefrontal cortex cells through comprehensive single-cell RNA-seq analysis
Enqiang Chang, Yangyang Wang, Ruilou Zhu, Lingzhi Wu, Yi Yang, Shuang Zeng, Ningtao Li, Xiaoguo Ruan, Mingyang Sun, Wei Zhang, Jun Zhou, Mengrong Miao, Hui Zhi, Hailin Zhao, Qian Chen, Qizhe Sun, Emer Chang, Albert Chang, Tingting Zhang, Xinfang He, Kan Liu, Song-Hua Ma, Weizhong Zhu, Youming Zhang, Luca Magnani, Daqing Ma, Jiaqiang Zhang
Abstract
The cellular and molecular actions of general anesthetics to induce anesthesia state and also cellular signaling changes for subsequent potential "long term" effects remain largely elusive. General anesthetics were reported to act on voltage-gated ion channels and ligand-gated ion channels. Here we used single-cell RNA-sequencing complemented with whole-cell patch clamp and calcium transient techniques to examine the gene transcriptome and ion channels profiling of sevoflurane and propofol, both commonly used clinically, on the human fetal prefrontal cortex (PFC) mixed cell cultures. Both propofol and sevoflurane at clinically relevant dose/concentration promoted "microgliosis" but only sevoflurane decreased microglia transcriptional similarity. Propofol and sevoflurane each extensively but transiently (<2 h) altered transcriptome profiling across microglia, excitatory neurons, interneurons, astrocytes and oligodendrocyte progenitor cells. Utilizing scRNA-seq as a robust and high-through put tool, our work may provide a comprehensive blueprint for future mechanistic studies of general anesthetics in clinically relevant settings.