RNA-seq Analysis of Control DPSC and DPSC Derived Neurons

A major challenge to the study and treatment of neurogenetic syndromes is the difficulty in gaining access to live neurons from individuals with these disorders. Although other sources of stem cells are currently available for differentiation into neurons, these can involve invasive procedures and be difficult or expensive to generate limiting their use on a broad scale, especially for rare syndromes which may not be well represented in the local population. Dental pulp stem cells (DPSC) are neural crest derived multipotent stem cells that reside deep the pulp of shed (baby) teeth and have the potential for broad use in the study of neurogenetic disease. In order to investigate the characteristics of DPSC which make them a valuable resource for the study of neurogenetic syndromes we performed a set of viability, senescence and immortalization studies on control DPSC and DPSC derived neurons. We investigated the basic transport conditions and determined the maximum passage number for primary DPSCs. We then immortalized control DPSC using human telomerase reverse trancriptase (hTERT) and evaluated both neuronal differentiation potential and gene expression changes using RNAseq. Here we show that immortalized DPSC share morphological and electrophysiological properties with non-immortalized DPSC. We also show that differentiation of DPSC into neurons changes gene expression for 1305 transcripts, while immortalized neurons differ significantly in gene expression for 183 transcripts of which 94 also changed during differentiation. Taken together, these studies indicate that immortalized dental pulp derived neruons may be a new and powerful resource for the study of rare neurological disorders where patient samples are rare or difficult to obtain.