Enhanced cortical neural stem cell identity through SMAD/WNT inhibition in human cerebral organoids facilitates emergence of outer radial glial cells

Cerebral organoids exhibit broad regional heterogeneity accompanied by limited cortical cellular diversity despite the tremendous upsurge in derivation methods, suggesting inadequate patterning of early neural stem cells (NSCs). Here we show that a short and early dual-SMAD/WNT inhibition course is necessary and sufficient for establishing robust and lasting cortical organoid NSC identity, efficiently suppressing of non-cortical NSC fates, while other widely used methods are inconsistent in their cortical NSC specification capacity. Accordingly, this method selectively enriches for outer radial glia (oRG) NSCs, which cytoarchitecturally demarcate well-defined outer sub-ventricular (oSVZ)-like regions propagating from superiorly radially organized, apical cortical rosette NSCs. Finally, this method culminates in the emergence of molecularly distinct deep and upper cortical layer neurons, and reliably uncovers cortex-specific microcephaly defects. Thus, a short SMAD/WNT inhibition is critical for establishing a rich cortical cell repertoire that enables mirroring fundamental molecular and cytoarchitectural features of cortical development and meaningful disease modeling.

Type: Other
Archiver: EGA European Genome-Phenome Archive

1 Dataset 1 Publication

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Dataset ID	Description	Technology	Samples
EGAD00001008609	For scRNA-Seq, single live cells were suspended in 0.4% BSA in DPBS buffer (1000 cells/µL) and subjected for GEM generation and barcoding. Library preparation was performed according to the recommended procedures of the manufacture Chromium Single Cell 3’ reagent Kit V3.1 chemistry. 10,000 cells were targeted for capturing and 9 cycles were used for cDNA amplification, while 12 cycles were performed for library formation, and sequencing was performed on an Illumina NovaSeq 6000 sequencer. For bulk RNA-Seq, RNA was purified using the miRNeasy™ RNA MiniPrep (Qiagene) and RNA-seq libraries were generated either using the Illumina TruSeq RNA Library Preparation Kits and sequenced on the Illumina HiSeq 2500 sequencer as 76 bp paired-end reads, or using the NEBnext UltraDirectional RNA Library Preparation Kits after rRNA depletion using the NEBNext rRNA depletion kit and sequenced on an Illumina HiSeq 2500 sequencer using 50 cycles of single-end sequencing.	Illumina HiSeq 2500 Illumina NovaSeq 6000	21

Publications	Citations
Enhanced cortical neural stem cell identity through short SMAD and WNT inhibition in human cerebral organoids facilitates emergence of outer radial glial cells. Rosebrock D, Arora S, Mutukula N, Volkman R, Gralinska E, Balaskas A, Aragonés Hernández A, Buschow R, Brändl B, Müller FJ, Arndt PF, Vingron M, Elkabetz Y. Nat Cell Biol 24: 2022 981-995	7