Direct Lineage Conversion of Adult Mouse Liver Cells and B Lymphocytes to Neural Stem Cells

Overexpression of transcription factors has been used to directly reprogram somatic cells into a range of other differentiated cell types, including multipotent neural stem cells (NSCs), that can be used to generate neurons and glia. However, the ability to maintain the NSC state independent of the...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Cassady, John P., D’Alessio, Ana C., Sarkar, Sovan, Fan, Zi Peng, Ganz, Kibibi, Roessler, Reinhard, Sur, Mriganka, Young, Richard A., Jaenisch, Rudolf, Dani, Vardhan, Young, Richard A.
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computational and Systems Biology Program
Format: Article
Language:en_US
Published: Elsevier 2015
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/96277
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5478-1568
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2442-5671
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8855-8647
Description
Summary:Overexpression of transcription factors has been used to directly reprogram somatic cells into a range of other differentiated cell types, including multipotent neural stem cells (NSCs), that can be used to generate neurons and glia. However, the ability to maintain the NSC state independent of the inducing factors and the identity of the somatic donor cells remain two important unresolved issues in transdifferentiation. Here we used transduction of doxycycline-inducible transcription factors to generate stable tripotent NSCs. The induced NSCs (iNSCs) maintained their characteristics in the absence of exogenous factor expression and were transcriptionally, epigenetically, and functionally similar to primary brain-derived NSCs. Importantly, we also generated tripotent iNSCs from multiple adult cell types, including mature liver and B cells. Our results show that self-maintaining proliferative neural cells can be induced from nonectodermal cells by expressing specific combinations of transcription factors.