Exploring causative gene and pathway of sevoflurane-induced anesthetic effects and implication on nervous system diseases based on high-throughput scRNA-seq data

Abstract Sevoflurane, as a commonly used anesthetic in surgery, can produce sedation, muscle relaxation and other anesthetic effects after inhalation. But the molecular mechanism of how sevoflurane influences nervous system diseases such as glioma is still unclear. In this study, we analyzed high-throughput single cell transcriptome data of sevoflurane treatment, and identified immune cells that play key roles in biological processes such as immunoinflammatory response and maintenance of blood-brain barrier. A total of 11,244 genes and variation were obtained by analyzing the cell development trajectory. And 10 key genes affected by sevoflurane were manually retrieved and their protein-protein interaction network were constructed. CGGA dataset was used for survival analysis. This article finds that sevoflurane can produce anesthetic effects through signaling pathways such as immune inflammatory response, neuronal differentiation, and maintenance of the blood-brain barrier. Meanwhile, genes that play a key role in these immune pathways, such as DAAM2 and EPHA3 genes, are significantly associated with the survival of glioma patients. Moreover, the experiment results showed that sevoflurane inhibits the invasive and migration of glioma cells by inhibiting the expression of EPHA3. The discovery may open new avenues to identify causative gene regulation events and highlight personalized treatments of nervous system diseases.