Self-organized amniogenesis by human pluripotent stem cells in a biomimetic implantation-like niche

In this work, we generated early human amnion-like tissues by culturing human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs) in a bioengineered implantation-like niche in vitro. To explore the gene expression profile of hPSC-derived amnion-like cells (hPSC-amnion), we performed mRNA-sequencing for both undifferentiated hPSCs and hPSC-amnion. Here we show that hPSC-amnion differs from hPSCs by actively regulating a comprehensive set of transcriptional regulation network and developmental signaling pathways such as BMP-SMAD signaling. Overall design: hPSCs cultured in conventional maintenance condition (mTeSR1-based feeder-free culture system; three biological replicates) as well as in the engineered implantation-like niche (the Gel-3D system composed of mTeSR1 and Geltrex; three biological replicates) were harvested and subjected to RNA-seq.