Generation of human microglia-like cells to study neurological disease

Microglia play important roles in developmental and homeostatic brain function, and influence the establishment and progression of many neurological disorders. Here, we demonstrate that renewable human iPSCs can be efficiently differentiated to microglial-like cells (iMGL) to study neurological diseases, such as Alzheimer's disease (AD). We find that iMGLs develop in vitro similarly to microglia in vivo and whole transcriptome analysis demonstrates that they are highly similar to adult and fetal human microglia. Functional assessment of iMGLs reveal that they secrete cytokines in response to inflammatory stimuli, migrate and undergo calcium transients, and robustly phagocytose CNS substrates. We also show novel use of iMGLs to examine the effects of fibrillar Aβ and brain-derived tau oligomers on AD-related gene expression and to interrogate mechanisms involved in synaptic pruning. Taken together, these findings demonstrate that iMGLs can be used in high-throughput studies of microglial function, providing important new insight into human neurological disease. Human cells were collected and analyzed for gene expression using RNA-seq.