Functionalizing Ascl1 with Novel Intracellular Protein Delivery Technology for Promoting Neuronal Differentiation of Human Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells

详细信息    查看全文

• 作者：Meghan Robinson ; Parv Chapani ; Tara Styan…
• 刊名：Stem Cell Reviews and Reports
• 出版年：2016
• 出版时间：August 2016
• 年：2016
• 卷：12
• 期：4
• 页码：476-483
• 全文大小：2,000 KB
• 刊物主题：Cell Biology;
• 出版者：Springer US
• ISSN：1558-6804
• 卷排序：12

文摘

Pluripotent stem cells can become any cell type found in the body. Accordingly, one of the major challenges when working with pluripotent stem cells is producing a highly homogenous population of differentiated cells, which can then be used for downstream applications such as cell therapies or drug screening. The transcription factor Ascl1 plays a key role in neural development and previous work has shown that Ascl1 overexpression using viral vectors can reprogram fibroblasts directly into neurons. Here we report on how a recombinant version of the Ascl1 protein functionalized with intracellular protein delivery technology (Ascl1-IPTD) can be used to rapidly differentiate human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) into neurons. We first evaluated a range of Ascl1-IPTD concentrations to determine the most effective amount for generating neurons from hiPSCs cultured in serum free media. Next, we looked at the frequency of Ascl1-IPTD supplementation in the media on differentiation and found that one time supplementation is sufficient enough to trigger the neural differentiation process. Ascl1-IPTD was efficiently taken up by the hiPSCs and enabled rapid differentiation into TUJ1-positive and NeuN-positive populations with neuronal morphology after 8 days. After 12 days of culture, hiPSC-derived neurons produced by Ascl1-IPTD treatment exhibited greater neurite length and higher numbers of branch points compared to neurons derived using a standard neural progenitor differentiation protocol. This work validates Ascl1-IPTD as a powerful tool for engineering neural tissue from pluripotent stem cells.KeywordsStem cellsProteinsDrug deliveryNeuroscienceIntracellular targetingNeurite extension