iScience (Jul 2023)

Isogenic human trophectoderm cells demonstrate the role of NDUFA4 and associated variants in ZIKV infection

  • Liuliu Yang,
  • Yuling Han,
  • Ting Zhou,
  • Lauretta A. Lacko,
  • Mohsan Saeed,
  • Christina Tan,
  • Ron Danziger,
  • Jiajun Zhu,
  • Zeping Zhao,
  • Clare Cahir,
  • Alice Maria Giani,
  • Yang Li,
  • Xue Dong,
  • Dorota Moroziewicz,
  • Daniel Paull,
  • Zhengming Chen,
  • Aaron Zhong,
  • Scott A. Noggle,
  • Charles M. Rice,
  • Qibin Qi,
  • Todd Evans,
  • Shuibing Chen

Journal volume & issue
Vol. 26, no. 7
p. 107001

Abstract

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Summary: Population-based genome-wide association studies (GWAS) normally require a large sample size, which can be labor intensive and costly. Recently, we reported a human induced pluripotent stem cell (hiPSC) array-based GWAS method, identifying NDUFA4 as a host factor for Zika virus (ZIKV) infection. In this study, we extended our analysis to trophectoderm cells, which constitute one of the major routes of mother-to-fetus transmission of ZIKV during pregnancy. We differentiated hiPSCs from various donors into trophectoderm cells. We then infected cells carrying loss of function mutations in NDUFA4, harboring risk versus non-risk alleles of SNPs (rs917172 and rs12386620) or having deletions in the NDUFA4 cis-regulatory region with ZIKV. We found that loss/reduction of NDUFA4 suppressed ZIKV infection in trophectoderm cells. This study validated our published hiPSC array-based system as a useful platform for GWAS and confirmed the role of NDUFA4 as a susceptibility locus for ZIKV in disease-relevant trophectoderm cells.

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