Micropattern differentiation of mouse pluripotent stem cells recapitulates embryo regionalized cell fate patterning
Abstract
During gastrulation epiblast cells exit pluripotency as they specify and spatially arrange the three germ layers of the embryo. Similarly, human pluripotent stem cells (PSCs) undergo spatially organized fate specification on micropatterned surfaces. Since in vivo validation is not possible for the human, we developed a mouse PSC micropattern system and, with direct comparisons to mouse embryos, reveal the robust specification of distinct regional identities. BMP, WNT, ACTIVIN and FGF directed mouse epiblast-like cells to undergo an epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition and radially pattern posterior mesoderm fates. Conversely, WNT, ACTIVIN and FGF patterned anterior identities, including definitive endoderm. By contrast, epiblast stem cells, a developmentally advanced state, only specified anterior identities, but without patterning. The mouse micropattern system offers a robust scalable method to generate regionalized cell types present in vivo, resolve how signals promote distinct identities and generate patterns, and compare mechanisms operating in vivo and in vitro and across species.
Data availability
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Reconstitution of the mouse germ-cell specification pathway in culture by pluripotent stem cellsPublicly available at the NCBI Gene Expression Omnibus (accession no: GSE30056).
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (R01DK084391)
- Anna-Katerina Hadjantonakis
National Cancer Institute (P30CA008748)
- Anna-Katerina Hadjantonakis
Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (R01HD080699)
- Eric D Siggia
National Science Foundation (PHY1502151)
- Eric D Siggia
Wellcome
- Sophie M Morgani
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Animal experimentation: Animal experimentation: All mice used in this study were maintained in accordance withthe guidelines of the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) under protocol number 03-12-017 (PI Hadjantonakis).
Copyright
© 2018, Morgani et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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