Zhang Hanwen, Peyton Lilia, McCarroll Ada, de León Guerrerro Sol Díaz, Zhang Siwei, Gowda Prarthana, Sirkin David, El Achwah Mahmoud, Duhe Alexandra, Wood Whitney G, Jamison Brandon, Tracy Gregory, Pollak Rebecca, Hart Ronald P, Pato Carlos N, Mulle Jennifer G, Sanders Alan R, Pang Zhiping P, Duan Jubao
Center for Psychiatric Genetics, NorthShore University HealthSystem, Evanston, IL.
Department of Neuroscience and Cell Biology, Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, New Brunswick, NJ.
bioRxiv. 2024 Mar 19:2024.03.18.585542. doi: 10.1101/2024.03.18.585542.
Translating genetic findings for neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders (NPD) into actionable disease biology would benefit from large-scale and unbiased functional studies of NPD genes. Leveraging the cytosine base editing (CBE) system, here we developed a pipeline for clonal loss-of-function (LoF) allele mutagenesis in human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) by introducing premature stop-codons (iSTOP) that lead to mRNA nonsense-mediated-decay (NMD) or protein truncation. We tested the pipeline for 23 NPD genes on 3 hiPSC lines and achieved highly reproducible, efficient iSTOP editing in 22 NPD genes. Using RNAseq, we confirmed their pluripotency, absence of chromosomal abnormalities, and NMD. Interestingly, for three schizophrenia risk genes (, ), despite the high efficiency of base editing, we only obtained heterozygous LoF alleles, suggesting their essential roles for cell growth. We replicated the reported neural phenotypes of -haploinsufficiency and found -LoF reduced neurite branches and synaptic puncta density. This iSTOP pipeline enables a scaled and efficient LoF mutagenesis of NPD genes, yielding an invaluable shareable resource.
将神经发育和精神疾病(NPD)的基因研究成果转化为可用于疾病生物学研究的内容,需要对NPD基因进行大规模且无偏倚的功能研究。利用胞嘧啶碱基编辑(CBE)系统,我们在此开发了一种方法,通过引入导致mRNA无义介导衰变(NMD)或蛋白质截短的提前终止密码子(iSTOP),在人诱导多能干细胞(hiPSC)中进行克隆性功能缺失(LoF)等位基因突变。我们在3种hiPSC系上对23个NPD基因测试了该方法,并在22个NPD基因中实现了高度可重复、高效的iSTOP编辑。通过RNA测序,我们证实了它们的多能性、无染色体异常以及NMD。有趣的是,对于三个精神分裂症风险基因(,),尽管碱基编辑效率很高,但我们仅获得了杂合的LoF等位基因,这表明它们对细胞生长具有重要作用。我们重复了报道的 -单倍剂量不足的神经表型,发现 -LoF减少了神经突分支和突触小体密度。这种iSTOP方法能够对NPD基因进行规模化且高效的LoF诱变,产生了一份宝贵的可共享资源。