MicroRNA profiling of self-renewing human neural stem cells reveals novel sets of differentially expressed microRNAs during neural differentiation in vitro

In recent years, the involvement of microRNAs (miRNAs) in orchestrating self-renewal and differentiation of stem cells has been highlighted in a number of studies.And while in human pluripotent stem cells, they have been directly linked to the core pluripotency network, including the cell cycle regulation, the role of miRNAs in the maintenance of the self-renewing capacity, and the onset of differentiation in other contexts, such as human brain development, remains poorly described.To bridge this gap, we used three model cell types: human embryonic stem cells (hESCs), hESCs-derived self-renewing neural stem cells (NSCs), and differentiating NSCs. We present comprehensive miRNA sequencing data that reveals novel sets of differentially expressed miRNAs during human neural development in vitro.Furthermore, we report the miRNA expression profile of self-renewing human NSCs, which has been lacking to this date. Our data also indicate that miRNA clusters enriched in NSCs share the seed sequence with cell cycle regulatory miRNAs in pluripotent hESCs. Lastly, our functional experiments confirmed that cluster miR-17-92, one of the NSCs-enriched clusters, is directly transcriptionally regulated by transcription factor C-MYC.A set of hESCs, NSCs, and Diff.NSCs was cultivated in duplicates, and total RNAs were pooled to get the final sets used for small RNA library preparation (hESC n=3; NSCs n=8; differentiated NSCs=6). The miRNAs expression within these cellular subtypes were compared.