Risperidone regulates the expression of schizophrenia-related genes in the murine forebrain

Abstract Risperidone acts on monoaminergic signaling to alleviate psychosis. At the cellular level, through both direct and indirect effects, the drug induces a specific pattern of gene expression, which differs between the basal ganglia and frontal cortex. These risperidone-regulated changes influence neuronal plasticity and are crucial for both its antipsychotic and extrapyramidal effects. Here, we employed sequencing-based spatial transcriptomics to comprehensively characterize gene expression changes in the male mouse (Mus musculus L.) forebrain after an acute dose of risperidone (0.5 mg/kg, i.p.). The transcriptional patterns were structure-specific, and unsupervised clustering of spatial profiles accurately identified cortical divisions, layers, and basal ganglia subregions. Differential gene expression was subsequently analyzed within each anatomically defined cluster using a customized statistical framework. Risperidone significantly altered the levels of 95 transcripts across 12 brain regions. The largest number of changes was observed in ventral brain areas, including the olfactory tubercle (25 differentially regulated transcripts), the diagonal band nucleus (22), the corpus callosum and commissures (13), and the lateral septal nucleus (9). Notably, 21 of the 95 differentially expressed genes were previously associated with schizophrenia, including Olig2, Smpd3, and Cacna1i. Overall, our results indicate that the strongest effects of risperidone are in medial and ventral brain regions rich in oligodendrocytes and glial cells. Furthermore, the enrichment analysis provides robust evidence of a molecular link between the drug’s mechanism of action and genetic factors involved in schizophrenia. Highlights Unsupervised clustering accurately identifies transcripts’ localization in the brain Acute risperidone treatment alters spatial transcriptional patterns of 95 genes Risperidone-regulated transcripts include 21 genes previously linked to schizophrenia Spatial gene expression analysis offers novel insight into the drug action mechanism Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest.