Hepatocytes obtained from mouse GPSCs are functional and show similar expression profiles to fetal primary hepatocytes. Mus musculus

Germline cell-derived pluripotent stem cells (GPSCs) are similar to embryonic stem (ES) cells in that they can proliferate intensively and differentiate into a variety of cell types, including cardiomyocytes and neurons. In this report, mouse GPSCs were induced to differentiate into hepatocytes with very high efficiency, and demonstrated, for the first time, to be functional. These hepatocytes were characterised at cellular and molecular levels. The GPSC-derived hepatocytes not only expressed hepatic markers, but were also metabolically active as shown by albumin and haptoglobin secretion, urea synthesis, glycogen storage and indocyanine green uptake. Previous studies have revealed some inherent differences in gene expression between undifferentiated mouse ES cells and GPSCs. We wanted to investigate whether this difference may impact on the hepatocyte differentiation capacity of the GPSCs. Large-scale gene expression profiling revealed a strong similarity between GPSC and ES cells at different stages of induced hepatic differentiation. Moreover, Pearson correlation analysis of the microarray datasets revealed that, at late hepatic differentiation stages, the in vitro-derived cells were closer to fetal mouse primary hepatocytes. Thus, adult GPSCs offer great potential for cell ment therapy for a wide variety of liver diseases. Overall design: Mouse ES cells and GPSCs at various times of hepatocyte differentiation, compared to embryonal (E16) and postnatal (PN1) mouse primary hepatocytes. The supplementary file 'GSE19044_non-normalized.txt' contains non-normalized data for Samples GSM471318-GSM471359.