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Human pluripotent stem cells provide a powerful human-genome based system for modeling human diseases in vitro and for potentially identifying novel treatments. Directed differentiation of pluripotent stem cells produces many specific cell types including dopaminergic neurons. Here, we generated a genetic reporter assay in pluripotent stem cells using newly-developed genome editing technologies in order to monitor differentiation efficiency and compare dopaminergic neuron survival under different conditions. We show that insertion of a luciferase reporter gene into the endogenous tyrosine hydroxylase (TH) locus enables rapid and easy quantification of dopaminergic neurons in cell culture throughout the entire differentiation process. Moreover, we demonstrate that the cellular assay is effective in assessing neuron response to different cytotoxic chemicals and is able to be scaled for high throughput applications. These results suggest that stem cell-derived terminal cell types can provide an alternative to traditional immortal cell lines or primary cells as a quantitative cellular model for toxin evaluation and drug discovery.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep25181 | DOI Listing |
Liver Int
October 2025
Division of Gastroenterology, Acireale Hospital, Azienda Sanitaria Provinciale di Catania, Catania, Italy.
Background And Aims: Gut-liver axis has been implicated in the pathophysiology of cirrhosis due to metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD), an in vitro model for studying epithelial gut dysfunction in MASLD is lacking. In this study, we aimed to characterise intestinal organoids derived from subjects with MASLD.
Materials And Methods: Intestinal organoids were obtained from duodenal samples of individuals with non-fibrotic MASLD and with MASLD-cirrhosis.
Br J Pharmacol
September 2025
Department of Physiology and Medical Physics, RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences, Dublin, Ireland.
Background And Purpose: Neuroinflammation is increasingly recognised to contribute to drug-resistant epilepsy. Activation of ATP-gated P2X7 receptors has emerged as an important upstream mechanism, and increased P2X7 receptor expression is present in the seizure focus in rodent models and patients. Pharmacological antagonists of P2X7 receptors attenuate seizures in rodents, but this has not been explored in human neural networks.
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September 2025
Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology, Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.
Cancer-associated muscle wasting is associated with poor clinical outcomes, but its underlying biology is largely uncharted in humans. Unbiased analysis of the RNAome (coding and non-coding RNAs) with unsupervised clustering using integrative non-negative matrix factorization provides a means of identifying distinct molecular subtypes and was applied here to muscle of patients with colorectal or pancreatic cancer. Rectus abdominis biopsies from 84 patients were profiled using high-throughput next-generation sequencing.
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September 2025
Institute of Biomechanics and Medical Engineering, Applied Mechanics Laboratory, Department of Engineering Mechanics, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.
The human stomach features distinct, regionalized functionalities along the anterior-posterior axis. Historically, studies on stomach patterning have used animal models to identify the underlying principles. Recently, human pluripotent stem (hPS)-cell-based gastric organoids for modelling domain-specific development of the fundic and antral epithelium are emerging.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNature
September 2025
Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA.
Loss-of-function variants in the lipid transporter ABCA7 substantially increase the risk of Alzheimer's disease, yet how they impact cellular states to drive disease remains unclear. Here, using single-nucleus RNA-sequencing analysis of human brain samples, we identified widespread gene expression changes across multiple neural cell types associated with rare ABCA7 loss-of-function variants. Excitatory neurons, which expressed the highest levels of ABCA7, showed disrupted lipid metabolism, mitochondrial function, DNA repair and synaptic signalling pathways.
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