This webinar will demonstrate how a research team at the National Institutes of Health evaluated a novel in situ hybridization approach and applied it to study splice variants related to schizophrenia.

The neurotrophic factor neuregulin-1, as well as its neuronal receptor ErbB4, are risk factors for schizophrenia. Distinct ErbB4 isoforms are generated by alternative splicing, and the levels of specific receptor isoforms are altered in postmortem brains of patients.

Because of these splice variants differ functionally, it is important to identify the cells that express distinct isoforms. However, traditional molecular analysis tools such as qRT-PCR and RNA sequencing require the disruption of dissected tissue to isolate RNA. To investigate in different cell types the relative amounts of the four ErbB4 variants in morphologically conserved brain tissue, the NIH team used the BaseScope in situ hybridization system with specific oligonucleotides targeting single exon/exon boundaries and fluorescence signal amplification.

This webinar will outline how the NIH researchers first determined the specificity and sensitivity of the BaseScope system and then used it to identify regional and cell-type specific expression of ErbB4 isoforms in the brain. The presentation will also explain how the NIH team quantified both the BaseScope and RNAscope assay signals using the freeware CellProfiler combined with an in-house analysis pipeline.