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Sex Differences in Brain Transcriptomes of Juvenile Cynomolgus Macaques
Nadia Kabbej1, Frederick J Ashby1, Alberto Riva2
1Department of Medicine, College of Medicine, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32610, USA.
Background:
Behavioral, social, and physical characteristics are posited to distinguish the sexes, yet research on transcription-level sexual differences in the brain is limited. Here, we investigated sexually divergent brain transcriptomics in pre-pubertal cynomolgus macaques, a commonly used surrogate species to humans.
Methods:
A transcriptomic profile using RNA sequencing was generated for the temporal lobe, ventral midbrain, and cerebellum of three female and three male cynomolgus macaques previously treated with an adeno-associated virus vector mix. Statistical analyses to determine differentially expressed protein-coding genes in all three lobes were conducted using DeSeq2 with a false-discovery-rate-corrected p-value of 0.05.
Results:
We identified target genes in the temporal lobe, ventral midbrain, and cerebellum with functions in translation, immunity, behavior, and neurological disorders that exhibited statistically significant sexually divergent expression.
Conclusions:
We provide potential mechanistic insights into the epidemiological differences observed between the sexes with regard to mental health and infectious diseases, such as COVID-19. Our results provide pre-pubertal information on sexual differences in non-human primate brain transcriptomics and may provide insight into health disparities between the biological sexes in humans.
