Shared mechanisms in the immune and nervous systems

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A thread on speculation and questions. To throw some ideas around and see if we can learn anything or find more questions.

Could we be looking at/for a shared system within the immune and nervous systems? Something which is either known and clearly reused or perhaps somewhere where biology is reusing a system in different ways within the two. Or maybe even where something is canonical in one system but not in the other? Whereby perhaps a shift or change affects both or a shift or change in one leaks or bleeds over into the other?

What systems could we be looking at? Both have receptors and that seems important. As well as synapses in the brain I’ve seen talk of immune synapses. What systems of variation or adaptability do both share? What biology is important and perhaps unique or particularly sensitive in both?

 

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One that has cropped up in my reading is glutamate. @SNT Gatchaman covered some papers nicely in this thread and I’ll drop some others later.

I decided to look at all glutamate receptor genes using my promoters snd enhancers script. It’s become a quick way of getting links to locations in DecodeME LocusZoom and Genecards info.

What does this tell us? Here’s my initial thoughts, more later…

- nothing meets the overall significance threshold
- there are a couple with smaller blips, notably GRIA1 (particularly this one enhancer, zoomed out LocusZoom here)
- and one gene (GRIA3) not looked at as it’s on the X chromosome.

That one blip and one unknown are in the same family could be interesting if the unknown becomes interesting too. And the sex bias factor of course.

These are the glutamate ionotropic receptor AMPA type subunit 1 (genecard) and subunit 3 (genecard). And the enhancer for GRIA1 is expressed on some interesting cells according to ensembl data with astrocytes and skeletal muscle myoblasts as well as a bunch of embryonic and stem cells, the first two seem a potential interesting combination and not universal looking at other elements. Maybe it’s nothing but seems worth thinking about and nosing around. If nothing else it’s only one enhancer on one gene so not wading through data.

So there’s no single broken gene or hit here but still some unknowns. Given there’s some lower significance blips and other analysis (like that of precision life data) has shown glutamatergic function as potentially relevant maybe this is pointing us in the direction of some mechanism, either just in some neurons or also in some immune cell populations. Although the data perhaps points more to astrocytes and myoblasts?

Or perhaps it’s just noise and coincidence on a fairly ubiquitous transmitter.