Year 1

The potential of stem cells, such as human embryonic stem cells and induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), has been widely recognized for cell replacement therapy, modeling human diseases and serving as a platform for drug screening and validation. In this grant, we proposed to use Rett syndrome as a proof of principle, to establish a human cell xenografting paradigm (i.e., transplanting human cells into mouse/rat embryos) and perform in vivo analyses to study the neurotransmission characteristics of normal and diseased human neurons. We initially determined that it was feasible to use the lentiviral CamKII-ChR2 construct to drive excitatory neuronal-specific expression of ChR2 in mouse hippocampal pyramidal neurons as well as human embryonic stem cell derived neurons. Importantly, we have found that both ChR2 expressing mouse hippocampal neurons and human neurons derived from embryonic stem cells can spike action potentials when stimulated in vitro, indicating that exogenously expressed ChR2 is functional. Furthermore, we successfully transplanted human embryonic stem cell derived neural stem/progenitor cells into fetal rat forebrain at embryonic day 17. Our analysis of the recipient animals at postnatal day 21 showed that approximately 40-50% of the cells survived and began to express neuronal markers, such as NeuN, indicating the neuronal differentiation, as well as the long-term survival, of transplanted human cells in the recipient animals. As originally proposed, we will proceed with the documentation of the in vivo phenotype of Rett syndrome diseased neurons. Our approach will be particularly crucial to not only validate candidate drugs or other therapeutic interventions to treat Rett syndrome using xeno-transplanted human Rett neurons, but also to study the in vivo behavior of those neurons with and without the therapeutic intervention.