GSE117906
GATA3 enhances the neurogenic potential of primary human astrocytes after traumatic injury [exp2]
Astrocytes are an abundant cell type in the vertebrate central nervous system and can act as neural stem cells in specialized niches where they constitutively generate new neurons. Outside the stem cell niches, however, these glial cells are not neurogenic. Although injuries in the mammalian central nervous system lead to profound proliferation of reactive astrocytes (RAs), which cluster at the lesion site to form a gliotic scar, neurogenesis does not take place. Therefore, a plausible regenerative therapeutic option is to coax the RAs to form neurons as an endogenous reservoir for repair. However, little is known on the mechanisms by which regenerative neurogenesis can be induced in mammalian RAs. In zebrafish, Gata acts as a regenerative factor that induces the plasticity of glial cells after injury. However, the effects of GATA in human astrocytes are not known. Therefore, in this report, we investigated how overexpression of GATA in primary fetal human astrocytes would affect the neurogenic potential before and after injury, and determined the transcriptional regulation exerted by GATA using next-generation sequencing. We found that GATA expression in primary human astrocyte cultures is not induced after scratch injury. Lentivirus-mediated overexpression of GATA significantly increased the number of SOX- expressing neural progenitors and altered the expression levels of genes related to cell proliferation and neurogenesis. Our results suggest that GATA is sufficient for enhancing the neurogenic potential of primary human astrocytes  after injury. Overall design: GFP or GATA3 tansduced primary human astrocytes were cultured in 3D StarPEG-Heparin hydrogels, stab lesions were created and RNA was isolated.