scholarly journals Comparative analysis of kidney organoid and adult human kidney single cell and single nucleus transcriptomes

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Haojia Wu ◽  
Kohei Uchimura ◽  
Erinn Donnelly ◽  
Yuhei Kirita ◽  
Samantha A. Morris ◽  
...  

AbstractKidney organoids differentiated from human pluripotent stem cells hold great promise for understanding organogenesis, modeling disease and ultimately as a source of replacement tissue. Realizing the full potential of this technology will require better differentiation strategies based upon knowledge of the cellular diversity and differentiation state of all cells within these organoids. Here we analyze single cell gene expression in 45,227 cells isolated from 23 organoids differentiated using two different protocols. Both generate kidney organoids that contain a diverse range of kidney cells at differing ratios as well as non-renal cell types. We quantified the differentiation state of major organoid kidney cell types by comparing them against a 4,259 single nucleus RNA-seq dataset generated from adult human kidney, revealing immaturity of all kidney organoid cell types. We reconstructed lineage relationships during organoid differentiation through pseudotemporal ordering, and identified transcription factor networks associated with fate decisions. These results define impressive kidney organoid cell diversity, identify incomplete differentiation as a major roadblock for current directed differentiation protocols and provide a human adult kidney snRNA-seq dataset against which to benchmark future progress.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ayshwarya Subramanian ◽  
Eriene-Heidi Sidhom ◽  
Maheswarareddy Emani ◽  
Nareh Sahakian ◽  
Katherine Vernon ◽  
...  

AbstractHuman iPSC-derived kidney organoids have the potential to revolutionize discovery, but assessing their consistency and reproducibility across iPSC lines, and reducing the generation of off-target cells remain an open challenge. Here, we used single cell RNA-Seq (scRNA-Seq) to profile 415,775 cells to show that organoid composition and development are comparable to human fetal and adult kidneys. Although cell classes were largely reproducible across iPSC lines, time points, protocols, and replicates, cell proportions were variable between different iPSC lines. Off-target cell proportions were the most variable. Prolonged in vitro culture did not alter cell types, but organoid transplantation under the mouse kidney capsule diminished off-target cells. Our work shows how scRNA-seq can help score organoids for reproducibility, faithfulness and quality, that kidney organoids derived from different iPSC lines are comparable surrogates for human kidney, and that transplantation enhances their formation by diminishing off-target cells.



2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Esther Liu ◽  
Behram Radmanesh ◽  
Byungha H. Chung ◽  
Michael D. Donnan ◽  
Dan Yi ◽  
...  

ABSTRACTBackgroundDNA variants in APOL1 associate with kidney disease, but the pathophysiological mechanisms remain incompletely understood. Model organisms lack the APOL1 gene, limiting the degree to which disease states can be recapitulated. Here we present single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) of genome-edited human kidney organoids as a platform for profiling effects of APOL1 risk variants in diverse nephron cell types.MethodsWe performed footprint-free CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing of human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) to knock in APOL1 high-risk G1 variants at the native genomic locus. iPSCs were differentiated into kidney organoids, treated with vehicle, IFN-γ, or the combination of IFN-γ and tunicamycin, and analyzed with scRNA-seq to profile cell-specific changes in differential gene expression patterns, compared to isogenic G0 controls.ResultsBoth G0 and G1 iPSCs differentiated into kidney organoids containing nephron-like structures with glomerular epithelial cells, proximal tubules, distal tubules, and endothelial cells. Organoids expressed detectable APOL1 only after exposure to IFN-γ. scRNA-seq revealed cell type-specific differences in G1 organoid response to APOL1 induction. Additional stress of tunicamycin exposure led to increased glomerular epithelial cell dedifferentiation in G1 organoids.ConclusionsSingle-cell transcriptomic profiling of human genome-edited kidney organoids expressing APOL1 risk variants provides a novel platform for studying the pathophysiology of APOL1-mediated kidney disease.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENTGaps persist in our mechanistic understanding of APOL1-mediated kidney disease. The authors apply genome-edited human kidney organoids, combined with single-cell transcriptomics, to profile APOL1 risk variants at the native genomic locus in different cell types. This approach captures interferon-mediated induction of APOL1 gene expression and reveals cellular dedifferentiation after a secondary insult of endoplasmic reticulum stress. This system provides a human cellular platform to interrogate complex mechanisms and human-specific regulators underlying APOL1-mediated kidney disease.



2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jens Hansen ◽  
Rachel Sealfon ◽  
Rajasree Menon ◽  
Michael T. Eadon ◽  
Blue B. Lake ◽  
...  

AbstractThe Kidney Precision Medicine Project (KPMP) plans to construct a spatially specified tissue atlas of the human kidney at a cellular resolution with near comprehensive molecular details. The atlas will have maps of healthy, acute kidney injury and chronic kidney disease tissues. To construct such maps, we integrate different data sets that profile mRNAs, proteins and metabolites collected by five KPMP Tissue Interrogation Sites. Here, we describe a set of hierarchical analytical methods to process, combine, and harmonize single-cell, single-nucleus and subsegmental laser microdissection (LMD) transcriptomics with LMD and near single-cell proteomics, 3-D nondestructive and immunofluorescence-based Codex imaging and spatial metabolomics datasets. We use nephrectomy, healthy living donor and surveillance transplant biopsy tissues to create a harmonized reference tissue map. Our results demonstrate that different assays produce reliable and coherent identification of cell types and tissue subsegments. They further show that the molecular profiles and pathways are partially overlapping yet complementary for cell type-specific and subsegmental physiological processes. Focusing on the proximal tubules, we find that our integrated systems biologybased analyses identify different subtypes of tubular cells with potential for different levels of lipid oxidation and energy generation. Integration of our omics data with pathways from the literature, enables us to construct predictive computational models to develop a smart kidney atlas. These integrated models can describe physiological capabilities of the tissues based on the underlying cell types and pathways in health and disease.



2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 550-556 ◽  
Author(s):  
Haojia Wu ◽  
Benjamin D. Humphreys

Methods to differentiate human pluripotent stem cells into kidney organoids were first introduced about 5 years ago, and since that time, the field has grown substantially. Protocols are producing increasingly complex three-dimensional structures, have been used to model human kidney disease, and have been adapted for high-throughput screening. Over this same time frame, technologies for massively parallel, single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) have matured. Now, both of these powerful approaches are being combined to better understand how kidney organoids can be applied to the understanding of kidney development and disease. There are several reasons why this is a synergistic combination. Kidney organoids are complicated and contain many different cell types of variable maturity. scRNA-seq is an unbiased technology that can comprehensively categorize cell types, making it ideally suited to catalog all cell types present in organoids. These same characteristics also make scRNA-seq a powerful approach for quantitative comparisons between protocols, batches, and pluripotent cell lines as it becomes clear that reproducibility and quality can vary across all three variables. Lineage trajectories can be reconstructed using scRNA-seq data, enabling the rational adjustment of differentiation strategies to promote maturation of desired kidney cell types or inhibit differentiation of undesired off-target cell types. Here, we review the ways that scRNA-seq has been successfully applied in the organoid field and predict future applications for this powerful technique. We also review other developing single-cell technologies and discuss how they may be combined, using “multiomic” approaches, to improve our understanding of kidney organoid differentiation and usefulness in modeling development, disease, and toxicity testing.



Gene Therapy ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. S. Mathew ◽  
C. M. Gorick ◽  
R. J. Price

AbstractGene delivery via focused ultrasound (FUS) mediated blood-brain barrier (BBB) opening is a disruptive therapeutic modality. Unlocking its full potential will require an understanding of how FUS parameters (e.g., peak-negative pressure (PNP)) affect transfected cell populations. Following plasmid (mRuby) delivery across the BBB with 1 MHz FUS, we used single-cell RNA-sequencing to ascertain that distributions of transfected cell types were highly dependent on PNP. Cells of the BBB (i.e., endothelial cells, pericytes, and astrocytes) were enriched at 0.2 MPa PNP, while transfection of cells distal to the BBB (i.e., neurons, oligodendrocytes, and microglia) was augmented at 0.4 MPa PNP. PNP-dependent differential gene expression was observed for multiple cell types. Cell stress genes were upregulated proportional to PNP, independent of cell type. Our results underscore how FUS may be tuned to bias transfection toward specific brain cell types in vivo and predict how those cells will respond to transfection.



2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann J. Ligocki ◽  
Wen Fury ◽  
Christian Gutierrez ◽  
Christina Adler ◽  
Tao Yang ◽  
...  

AbstractBulk RNA sequencing of a tissue captures the gene expression profile from all cell types combined. Single-cell RNA sequencing identifies discrete cell-signatures based on transcriptomic identities. Six adult human corneas were processed for single-cell RNAseq and 16 cell clusters were bioinformatically identified. Based on their transcriptomic signatures and RNAscope results using representative cluster marker genes on human cornea cross-sections, these clusters were confirmed to be stromal keratocytes, endothelium, several subtypes of corneal epithelium, conjunctival epithelium, and supportive cells in the limbal stem cell niche. The complexity of the epithelial cell layer was captured by eight distinct corneal clusters and three conjunctival clusters. These were further characterized by enriched biological pathways and molecular characteristics which revealed novel groupings related to development, function, and location within the epithelial layer. Moreover, epithelial subtypes were found to reflect their initial generation in the limbal region, differentiation, and migration through to mature epithelial cells. The single-cell map of the human cornea deepens the knowledge of the cellular subsets of the cornea on a whole genome transcriptional level. This information can be applied to better understand normal corneal biology, serve as a reference to understand corneal disease pathology, and provide potential insights into therapeutic approaches.



2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stella Belonwu ◽  
Yaqiao Li ◽  
Daniel Bunis ◽  
Arjun Arkal Rao ◽  
Caroline Warly Solsberg ◽  
...  

Abstract Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is a complex neurodegenerative disease that gravely affects patients and imposes an immense burden on caregivers. Apolipoprotein E4 (APOE4) has been identified as the most common genetic risk factor for AD, yet the molecular mechanisms connecting APOE4 to AD are not well understood. Past transcriptomic analyses in AD have revealed APOE genotype-specific transcriptomic differences; however, these differences have not been explored at a single-cell level. Here, we leverage the first two single-nucleus RNA sequencing AD datasets from human brain samples, including nearly 55,000 cells from the prefrontal and entorhinal cortices. We observed more global transcriptomic changes in APOE4 positive AD cells and identified differences across APOE genotypes primarily in glial cell types. Our findings highlight the differential transcriptomic perturbations of APOE isoforms at a single-cell level in AD pathogenesis and have implications for precision medicine development in the diagnosis and treatment of AD.



2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcus Alvarez ◽  
Elior Rahmani ◽  
Brandon Jew ◽  
Kristina M. Garske ◽  
Zong Miao ◽  
...  

AbstractSingle-nucleus RNA sequencing (snRNA-seq) measures gene expression in individual nuclei instead of cells, allowing for unbiased cell type characterization in solid tissues. Contrary to single-cell RNA seq (scRNA-seq), we observe that snRNA-seq is commonly subject to contamination by high amounts of extranuclear background RNA, which can lead to identification of spurious cell types in downstream clustering analyses if overlooked. We present a novel approach to remove debris-contaminated droplets in snRNA-seq experiments, called Debris Identification using Expectation Maximization (DIEM). Our likelihood-based approach models the gene expression distribution of debris and cell types, which are estimated using EM. We evaluated DIEM using three snRNA-seq data sets: 1) human differentiating preadipocytes in vitro, 2) fresh mouse brain tissue, and 3) human frozen adipose tissue (AT) from six individuals. All three data sets showed various degrees of extranuclear RNA contamination. We observed that existing methods fail to account for contaminated droplets and led to spurious cell types. When compared to filtering using these state of the art methods, DIEM better removed droplets containing high levels of extranuclear RNA and led to higher quality clusters. Although DIEM was designed for snRNA-seq data, we also successfully applied DIEM to single-cell data. To conclude, our novel method DIEM removes debris-contaminated droplets from single-cell-based data fast and effectively, leading to cleaner downstream analysis. Our code is freely available for use at https://github.com/marcalva/diem.



2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tallulah S Andrews ◽  
Jawairia Atif ◽  
Jeff C Liu ◽  
Catia T Perciani ◽  
Xue-Zhong Ma ◽  
...  

The critical functions of the human liver are coordinated through the interactions of hepatic parenchymal and non-parenchymal cells. Recent advances in single cell transcriptional approaches have enabled an examination of the human liver with unprecedented resolution. However, dissociation related cell perturbation can limit the ability to fully capture the human liver's parenchymal cell fraction, which limits the ability to comprehensively profile this organ. Here, we report the transcriptional landscape of 73,295 cells from the human liver using matched single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) and single-nucleus RNA sequencing (snRNA-seq). The addition of snRNA-seq enabled the characterization of interzonal hepatocytes at single-cell resolution, revealed the presence of rare subtypes of hepatic stellate cells previously only seen in disease, and detection of cholangiocyte progenitors that had only been observed during in vitro differentiation experiments. However, T and B lymphocytes and NK cells were only distinguishable using scRNA-seq, highlighting the importance of applying both technologies to obtain a complete map of tissue-resident cell-types. We validated the distinct spatial distribution of the hepatocyte, cholangiocyte and stellate cell populations by an independent spatial transcriptomics dataset and immunohistochemistry. Our study provides a systematic comparison of the transcriptomes captured by scRNA-seq and snRNA-seq and delivers a high-resolution map of the parenchymal cell populations in the healthy human liver.



2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhengyu Ouyang ◽  
Nathanael Bourgeois ◽  
Eugenia Lyashenko ◽  
Paige Cundiff ◽  
Patrick F Cullen ◽  
...  

Induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) derived cell types are increasingly employed as in vitro model systems for drug discovery. For these studies to be meaningful, it is important to understand the reproducibility of the iPSC-derived cultures and their similarity to equivalent endogenous cell types. Single-cell and single-nucleus RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) are useful to gain such understanding, but they are expensive and time consuming, while bulk RNA-seq data can be generated quicker and at lower cost. In silico cell type decomposition is an efficient, inexpensive, and convenient alternative that can leverage bulk RNA-seq to derive more fine-grained information about these cultures. We developed CellMap, a computational tool that derives cell type profiles from publicly available single-cell and single-nucleus datasets to infer cell types in bulk RNA-seq data from iPSC-derived cell lines.



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