Human Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell-Derived Pericytes as Scalable and Editable Source to Study Direct Lineage...

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Stem Cell Biology
• Cellular Reprogramming

Background:

• Studying human somatic cell-to-neuron conversion is challenging due to limitations in primary brain biopsy material.
• Previous work demonstrated direct pericyte-to-induced neuron (iN) conversion from adult human cerebral cortex.

Purpose of the Study:

• To introduce human induced pluripotent stem cell (hiPSC)-derived pericytes as a versatile and uniform tool for studying pericyte-to-neuron conversion.
• To enable scalable cell production and engineering of starting cell populations for neuronal differentiation.

Main Methods:

• Utilized hiPSC technology to derive pericytes (hiPSC-pericytes).
• Engineered hiPSC-pericytes by introducing reporter tools.
• Established hiPSC-derived human-human neuronal cocultures for studying cell conversion.

Main Results:

• hiPSC-pericytes provide a more uniform and scalable cell source compared to primary cells.
• hiPSC-derived neuronal cocultures allowed for independent manipulation of cell types.
• Induced neurons derived from hiPSC-pericytes exhibited more mature morphology.

Conclusions:

• hiPSC-based methods facilitate the analysis of human somatic cell-to-neuron conversion.
• This strategy offers a robust platform for studying neuronal reprogramming and disease modeling.