A Gene-Expression Based Comparison of Murine and Human Inhibitory Interneurons in the Cerebellar Cortex and Nuclei

Cerebellar information processing is critically shaped by several types of inhibitory interneurons forming various intra-cerebellar feed-forward and feed-back loops. Evidence gathered over the past decades has focused interest on a non-uniform set of cortical inhibitory interneurons distinct from "classical" Golgi, basket or stellate cells, summarily referred to as PLIs (for Purkinje cell layer interneurons). Similarly, cerebellar nuclear inhibitory interneurons have gained increasing attention. Our understanding of the functions of these cells is still fragmentary. For humans, we lack functional data, and even any dependable morphological classification for these cells. Here, I used publicly available single cell based gene expression data to compare inhibitory interneurons from the cerebellar cortex and inhibitory nuclear neurons of humans and mice. Integration of nuclear and cortical cells revealed transcriptomic similarities between subsets of these cells and suggest known characteristics of cortical cell types may be helpful to devise strategies for the further characterization of nuclear inhibitory interneurons. Comparison of human and murine PLIs indicate that these strongly differ by the expression of genes used to characterize these cells in mice. This limits their utility to identify and classify human PLIs, and leaves the question open as to the number and characteristics of non-Golgi inhibitory interneurons resident in the cerebellar granule cell and Purkinje cell layers in humans.