Induced Neuronal Cells: A Novel Approach to Study Neuropsychiatric Diseases

描述（由申请人提供）：最近鉴定出可诱导成纤维细胞转化为多能干（iPS）细胞的转录因子（TF），这使得从成纤维细胞产生患者特异性神经元成为可能。然而，这样产生的神经元很难获得。本项目建立在初步结果的基础上，其中我们证明了成人成纤维细胞直接转化为神经元，称为“诱导神经元细胞”（iN细胞），没有iPS中间体。所得到的iN细胞具有神经元的功能特性，包括通过电生理学测定的形成功能性突触的能力。因此，iN细胞技术为产生和研究人类神经元提供了一种新的、更简便的方法，并为研究人类疾病过程开辟了一条新的途径。然而，在这一点上，iN细胞技术仅针对小鼠成纤维细胞开发，关于iN细胞的转化过程和分子身份的基本问题尚未确定，从人成纤维细胞产生iN细胞尚未建立，最重要的是，iN细胞技术研究影响神经元功能的疾病的可行性尚未得到证实。在这个项目中，我们建议利用Wernig和S的专业知识，以跨学科的方法来解决这些重要的挑战。|德霍夫实验室我们提出的实验，将系统地调查iN细胞的细胞和分子身份，并制定协议，以诱导特定的神经元亚群成纤维细胞。然后，这些方案将用于在小鼠iN细胞中模拟遗传疾病。此外，我们将把我们的发现扩展到人类成纤维细胞，长期目标是建立神经精神疾病的细胞模型。我们的目标将通过组织培养实验，从小鼠和人类培养的细胞，细胞生物学，分子生物学和电生理学的组合来实现。我们相信我们提出的实验有可能从根本上改变现有的细胞分化和表观遗传基因调控的范式，并可以提供一个新的平台来研究患有各种脑部疾病的患者的人类神经元。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The recent identification of transcription factors (TFs) that can induce conversion of fibroblasts into pluripotent stem (iPS) cells makes it potentially possible to generate patient-specific neurons from fibroblasts. However, the neurons thus produced are difficult to obtain. The present project builds on preliminary results in which we demonstrate direct conversion of adult fibroblasts cells into neurons, referred to as 'induced neuronal cells' (iN cells), without an iPS intermediate. The resulting iN cells have the functional properties of neurons, including the ability to form functional synapses as assayed by electrophysiology. Thus, the iN cell technology provides a novel, more facile approach to generating and studying human neurons, and opens up a new avenue to investigating human disease processes. However, at this point the iN cell technology has only been developed for mouse fibroblasts, fundamental questions regarding the conversion process and the molecular identity of iN cells were not determined, the generation of iN cells from human fibroblasts has not yet been established, and most importantly, the feasibility of the iN cell technology to study diseases affecting neuronal function has not been demonstrated. In this project, we propose to address these important challenges in an interdisciplinary approach capitalizing from the combined expertises of the Wernig and S|dhof laboratories. We propose experiments that will systematically investigate the cellular and molecular identity of iN cells, and develop protocols to induce specific neuronal subpopulations from fibroblasts. These protocols will then be employed to model genetic diseases in mouse iN cells. Furthermore, we will extend our findings to human fibroblasts, with the long term goal to establish a cell model for neuropsychiatric diseases. Our goals will be pursued by a combination of tissue culture experiments with cells cultured from mice and humans, cell biology, molecular biology, and electrophysiology. We believe our proposed experiments have the potential to fundamentally change existing paradigms of cellular differentiation and epigenetic gene regulation, and could provide a novel platform to study human neurons from patients suffering from a variety of brain diseases.