Stem Cell Research & Therapy (Jun 2024)

Bioorthogonal non-canonical amino acid tagging to track transplanted human induced pluripotent stem cell-specific proteome

  • Divya Sridharan,
  • Julie A. Dougherty,
  • Uzair Ahmed,
  • Shridhar K. Sanghvi,
  • Syed Baseeruddin Alvi,
  • Ki Ho Park,
  • Helena Islam,
  • Sue E. Knoblaugh,
  • Harpreet Singh,
  • Elizabeth D. Kirby,
  • Mahmood Khan

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1186/s13287-024-03792-3
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 15, no. 1
pp. 1 – 17

Abstract

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Abstract Background Human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) and their differentiated cell types have a great potential for tissue repair and regeneration. While the primary focus of using hiPSCs has historically been to regenerate damaged tissue, emerging studies have shown a more potent effect of hiPSC-derived paracrine factors on tissue regeneration. However, the precise contents of the transplanted hiPSC-derived cell secretome are ambiguous. This is mainly due to the lack of tools to distinguish cell-specific secretome from host-derived proteins in a complex tissue microenvironment in vivo. Methods In this study, we present the generation and characterization of a novel hiPSC line, L274G-hiPSC, expressing the murine mutant methionyl-tRNA synthetase, L274GMmMetRS, which can be used for tracking the cell specific proteome via biorthogonal non-canonical amino acid tagging (BONCAT). We assessed the trilineage differentiation potential of the L274G-hiPSCs in vitro and in vivo. Furthermore, we assessed the cell-specific proteome labelling in the L274G-hiPSC derived cardiomyocytes (L274G-hiPSC-CMs) in vitro following co-culture with wild type human umbilical vein derived endothelial cells and in vivo post transplantation in murine hearts. Results We demonstrated that the L274G-hiPSCs exhibit typical hiPSC characteristics and that we can efficiently track the cell-specific proteome in their differentiated progenies belonging to the three germ lineages, including L274G-hiPSC-CMs. Finally, we demonstrated cell-specific BONCAT in transplanted L274G-hiPSC-CMs. Conclusion The novel L274G-hiPSC line can be used to study the cell-specific proteome of hiPSCs in vitro and in vivo, to delineate mechanisms underlying hiPSC-based cell therapies for a variety of regenerative medicine applications.

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