Project Details
Description
Project Summary
Myogenic direct reprogramming from non-muscle somatic cells has become an important strategy to
produce abundant, patient-specific, and disease-specific human myogenic cells, which are highly desirable for
therapeutic applications and disease modeling. As compared to deriving myogenic cells from hiPSCs, direct
reprogramming is substantially quicker, and reprogrammed cells avoid the risk of teratoma formation and retain
aging- and disease-associated epigenetic signatures, which is particularly important for modeling aging-related
muscle diseases. Despite these advantages, applications of directly reprogrammed myogenic cells are
hampered by low reprogramming efficiency and their immature nature. It is challenging to improve
reprogramming through rational design, as molecular mechanisms underlying the process remain largely
unknown; therefore, high-throughput screening (HTS) is an important strategy to expedite discovery of more
efficient direct reprogramming technologies. A major hurdle to effective HTS for direct reprogramming
technologies is the difficulty to establish a simple, low-cost phenotypic readout that truly represents an integrative
biological endpoint defining the target lineage. We recently discovered that myogenic cells cultured on surfaces
patterned with parallel nanogrooves/ridges and functionalized with Matrigel form myotubes aligning nearly
perpendicular to the nanogrooves, and this phenotype is unique and universal for all non-diseased myogenic
cells, regardless of their origin and species. Quantitative analysis of myotube orientations reveals a single peak
near 90°; furthermore, when normal myogenic cells are mixed with diseased cells that do not exhibit this
phenotype, myotube orientation angle decreases with the percentage of the normal myogenic cells. We
hypothesize that when cultured on nanogrooved, Matrigel-functionalized surface, myotubes derived from
reprogrammed cells will exhibit increased orientation angles relative to the nanogrooves with increasing
reprogramming efficiency, and this highly reproducible and quantifiable phenotype will provide a simple, low-
cost, and physiologically relevant readout for effective HTS to discover efficient myogenic reprogramming
technologies. We plan to test our hypothesis by (1) developing a high-throughput screening platform using
myotube orientation relative to nanogrooves as a physiologically relevant readout and use this platform to
discover novel small compounds capable of enhancing myogenic reprogramming efficiency, (2) characterizing
the myotubes at molecular, structural, and functional levels, and (3) dissecting transcriptional and epigenetic
mechanisms underlying the positive effects of the novel compounds. The proposed study will result in new
technologies to generate directly reprogrammed human myogenic cells exhibiting more similarities to true
myogenic cells. The established HTS platform can be used to discover other types of enhancers for myogenic
reprogramming (transcription factors, microRNAs) and the enriched pathways and motifs identified in the cells
reprogrammed with the novel compounds will indicate novel targets to further improve reprogramming efficiency.
Status | Finished |
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Effective start/end date | 5/1/23 → 4/30/24 |
Funding
- National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases: $196,570.00
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