GSE203070
NR5A1 and FOXL2 Induce Human Fibroblasts into Steroidogenic Ovarian Granulosa-Like Cells
Granulosa cells provide essential niche for ovarian folliculogenesis by communicating with oocytes and secreting steroids at different follicular stages, but current cellular models for studying human granulosa cells mainly rely on immortal cancer cell lines. Here, we established a reprogramming method to collect early and late granulosa cells with different steroidogenic abilities. We applied AMH-fluorescence-reporter system to screen six candidate factors for cellular reprogramming and generated human induced granulosa like cells (hiGC) by overexpressing FOXL2 and NR5A1. AMH-EGFP+ hiGC resembled human cumulus cells in transcriptome profiling and secreted high levels of estrogen as well as progesterone, similar to late-stage granulosa cells at antral or preovulatory stage. Moreover, we identified a cell surface marker CD55 which can be used to isolate early-stage granulosa cells. CD55+AMH-EGFP- hiGC secreted high levels of estrogen but low levels of progesterone, and the transcriptome profiles were more similar to early-stage granulosa cells. Both types of the hiGC promoted oocyte maturation when cocultured with immature oocytes. More importantly, when CD55+ hiGC were transplanted to mouse model with Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), the number of cystic follicles was significantly reduced, showing alleviation of PCOS. Hence, hiGC provides a cellular model to study developmental program of human granulosa cells and has potential to treat PCOS. Overall design: comparative gene exspression profiling analysis of AMH-EGFP+ cells, CD55+ cells, CD55+AMH-EGFP- cells, human cumulus granulosa cells, CTRL cells of fibroblast cells, each group has two replicates.