Project description:Gene expression in NS5 murine neural stem cells was compared to that of astrocytes derived from NS5 cells via 3 days of treatment with foetal calf serum (FCS). Keywords: cell type comparison
Project description:Introgressed variants from other species can be an important source of genetic variation because they may arise rapidly, can include multiple mutations on a single haplotype, and have often been pretested by selection in the species of origin. Although introgressed alleles are generally deleterious, several studies have reported introgression as the source of adaptive alleles-including the rodenticide-resistant variant of Vkorc1 that introgressed from Mus spretus into European populations of Mus musculus domesticus. Here, we conducted bidirectional genome scans to characterize introgressed regions into one wild population of M. spretus from Spain and three wild populations of M. m. domesticus from France, Germany, and Iran. Despite the fact that these species show considerable intrinsic postzygotic reproductive isolation, introgression was observed in all individuals, including in the M. musculus reference genome (GRCm38). Mus spretus individuals had a greater proportion of introgression compared with M. m. domesticus, and within M. m. domesticus, the proportion of introgression decreased with geographic distance from the area of sympatry. Introgression was observed on all autosomes for both species, but not on the X-chromosome in M. m. domesticus, consistent with known X-linked hybrid sterility and inviability genes that have been mapped to the M. spretus X-chromosome. Tract lengths were generally short with a few outliers of up to 2.7 Mb. Interestingly, the longest introgressed tracts were in olfactory receptor regions, and introgressed tracts were significantly enriched for olfactory receptor genes in both species, suggesting that introgression may be a source of functional novelty even between species with high barriers to gene flow.
Project description:Ectopic expression of the reprogramming factors OCT4, SOX2, or NANOG into human astrocytes in specific cytokine/culture conditions activated the neural stem gene program and induced generation of cells expressing neural stem/precursor markers. Here we compare the whole gene expression profile of primary human astrocytes (Astro) with neural stem cells (HNSC) derived from astrocytes reprogramming
Project description:Recent advances have suggested that direct induction of neural stem cells could provide an alternative to derivation from somatic tissues or pluripotent cells. Here we show direct derivation of stably expandable NS cells from mouse fibroblasts through a curtailed version of reprogramming to pluripotency. By constitutively inducing Sox2, Klf4, and c-Myc while strictly limiting Oct4 activity to the initial phase of reprogramming, we generated neurosphere-like colonies that could be expanded for more than 50 passages and do not depend on sustained expression of the reprogramming factors. These induced NS (iNS) cells uniformly display morphological and molecular features of NS cells such as the expression of Nestin, Pax6, and Olig2 and have a similar genome-wide transcriptional profile to brain-derived NSCs. iNS cells can differentiate into neurons, astrocytes and oligodendrocytes in vitro and in vivo. Our results demonstrate that functional neural stem cells can be generated from somatic cells by factor-driven induction. mRNA extracted from Murine Embryonic Fibroblasts (MEF), murine Embryonic Stem Cell (ES), murine Neuronal Stem Cell (NS) and three murine induces Neuronal Stem Cell clones 2, 3 and 5 (iNS2, iNS3, iNS5) has been hybridized on Illumina MouseWG6 V2 arrays for genome wide expression analysis. Samples were run at least as triple, MEF, iNS3, iNS5 as quadruple technical replicates. Differential gene expression analysis has been performed on the grouped expression data with the Murine Embryonic Fibroblasts group as the reference.