Axonal mRNA in human embryonic stem cell derived neurons

The identification of axonal mRNAs in model organisms has led to the discovery of many axonally translated proteins required for axon guidance and injury response. The extent to which these axonal mRNAs are conserved in humans is unknown. Here we report on the axonal transcriptome of glutamatergic neurons derived from human embryonic stem cells (hESC-neurons) grown in axon isolating microfluidic chambers. We identified mRNAs enriched in axons, representing a functionally unique local transcriptome as compared to the whole neuron transcriptome. Further, we found that the enriched functional categories within high confidence axonal transcripts resemble those in the axonal transcriptome of rat cortical neurons. Comparing our list of human axonal transcripts to similar datasets generated from embryonic and adult rat dorsal root ganglia and rat cortical neurons we found 60 mRNAs common to all four neuron types. We found that over half of these genes are associated with neurological phenotypes or diseases in model organisms and human. This data provides an important resource for studying local mRNA translation in human axons and has the potential to reveal both conserved and unique axonal mechanisms across species and neuronal types. We analyzed the axonal and whole hESC-neuron transcriptome in triplicate using the Affymetrix Human Gene 2.0 ST Array platform.