A lentiviral vector visualizing the germ cell specification in vitro under the control of Figla promoter

Premature ovarian failure (POF) is affecting more and more women, which is the loss of function of the ovaries before age 40. To elucidate the underlying mechanisms of the oogenesis is of importance to understand the causes of impaired fertility and POF. However, mammalian oogenesis in vivo is a complex process. Thus, building an oogenesis visualizing system is beneficial for the study of oogenesis. In this study, we found that Figla is specifically expressed in female mice oocyte. Then, we constructed a lentiviral vector (pTRIP-Figla-EGFP-puro) under the control of Figla promoter, which drived enhanced green fluorescent protein (EGFP) as an indicator and used the lentiviral vector transduction the ovarian cells and induced germ cells derived from human umbilical cord mesenchymal stem cells (hUC-MSCs), and the results showed that the lentiviral vector we constructed was able to specifically express green fluorescent protein (GFP) in the ovarian oocyte and induced oocyte-like cells derived from hUC-MSCs, which was Figla-positive cells. These results suggest that pTRIP-Figla-EGFP vector provides a new system to study the role of Figla in oogenesis, and an approach to study the development and the differentiation of germ cells derived from stem cells.