Biology subjects

Apud, J. A.

Publications and source records attributed to Apud, J. A..

2 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2021

Electrophysiological measures from human iPSC-derived neurons are associated with schizophrenia clinical status and predict individual cognitive performance

Neurons derived from human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) have been used to model basic cellular aspects of neuropsychiatric disorders, but the relationship between the emergent phenotypes and the clinical characteristics of donor individuals has been unclear. We analyzed RNA expression and indices of cellular function in hiPSC-derived neural progenitors and cortical neurons generated from 13 individuals with high polygenic risk scores (PRS) for schizophrenia and a clinical diagnosis of schizophrenia, along with 15 neurotypical individuals with low PRS. We identified electrophysiological measures associated with diagnosis that implicated altered Na+ channel function and GABA-ergic neurotransmission. Importantly, electrophysiological measures predicted cardinal clinical and cognitive features found in these schizophrenia patients. The identification of basic neuronal physiological properties related to core clinical characteristics of illness is a potentially critical step in generating leads for novel therapeutics.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2018

Dissecting transcriptomic signatures of neuronal differentiation and maturation using iPSCs

Human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) are a powerful model of neural differentiation and maturation. We present a hiPSC transcriptomics resource on corticogenesis from 5 iPSC donor and 13 subclonal lines across nine time points over 5 broad conditions: self-renewal, early neuronal differentiation, neural precursor cells (NPCs), assembled rosettes, and differentiated neuronal cells that were validated using electrophysiology. We identified widespread changes in the expression of individual transcript features and their splice variants, gene networks, and global patterns of transcription. We next demonstrated that co-culturing human NPCs with rodent astrocytes resulted in mutually synergistic maturation, and that cell type-specific expression data can be extracted using only sequencing read alignments without potentially disruptive cell sorting. We lastly developed and validated a computational tool to estimate the relative neuronal maturity of iPSC-derived neuronal cultures and human brain tissue, which were maturationally heterogeneous but contained subsets of cells most akin to adult human neurons.

genomics↗