GSE132504
Single cell RNA sequencing of in vitro differentiation NMP protocols
The mammalian embryos Caudal Lateral Epiblast (CLE) harbours bipotent progenitors, called Neural Mesodermal Progenitors (NMPs), that contribute to the spinal cord and the paraxial mesoderm throughout axial elongation. Here we performed a single cell analysis of different in vitro NMPs populations produced either from embryonic stem cells (ESCs) or epiblast stem cells (EpiSCs) and compared them to E8.25 CLE mouse embryos. In our analysis of this region our findings challenge the notion that NMPs can be defined by the exclusive coexpression of Sox2 and T at mRNA level. We analyse the in vitro NMP-like populations using a purpose-built Support Vector Machine (SVM) based on the embryo CLE and use it as a classification model to compare the in vivo and in vitro populations. Our results show that NMP differentiation from ESCs, leads to heterogeneous progenitor populations with few NMP-like cells, as defined by the SVM algorithm, whereas starting with EpiSCs, yields a high proportion of cells with the embryo NMP signature. We find that the population from which the Epi-NMPs are derived in culture contains a node-like population, which leads to suggest that this population probably maintains the expression of T in vitro and thereby a source of NMPs. In conclusion, differentiation of EpiSCs into NMPs reproduces events in vivo and suggests a sequence of events for the emergence of the NMPs population. Overall design: We performed single cell RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) for different in vitro NMPs populations produced either from ESCs or EpiSCs: ES-NMP, Epi-CE as well as of the T expressing cells from the Epi-CE population (Epi-CE-T) and Epi-NMP. 10x Genomics single cell transcriptomic service was used to sequence our 4 samples.