Directed Differentiation of Trophoblast Stem Cells Provides a Useful In Vitro Model of Placenta Development in Cattle [scRNA-seq]

By utilizing a previously established bovine trophoblast stem cell (bTSC) model, we developed an optimized differentiation strategy to capture the complete developmental trajectory of placental binucleate cells (BNCs). This study provides new insights, demonstrating that extending the culture duration allows bTSCs to overcome previous developmental bottlenecks and faithfully recapitulate the in vivo BNC program, including the expression of late-stage secretory markers. Furthermore, we have shown that this tractable in vitro system serves as a robust platform for functional genomics, as evidenced by our validation of the transcription factor GCM1 as a driver of BNC differentiation. Overall design: To assess cellular heterogeneity and differentiation dynamics in day-10 differentiated trophoblast cells, nuceli were extracted from snap frozen cells and submitted to the Genomics core at the university of Missouri for Multi-omoic analysis. Only transcriptomic data is included in this manuscript.