PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Giovanni Canu
AU  - Emmanouil Athanasiadis
AU  - Rodrigo A. Grandy
AU  - Jose Garcia-Bernardo
AU  - Paulina M. Strzelecka
AU  - Ludovic Vallier
AU  - Daniel Ortmann
AU  - Ana Cvejic
TI  - Analysis of Endothelial-to-Haematopoietic Transition at the Single Cell Level identifies Cell Cycle Regulation as a Driver of Differentiation
AID  - 10.1101/2020.04.03.023762
DP  - 2020 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2020.04.03.023762
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/04/04/2020.04.03.023762.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/04/04/2020.04.03.023762.full
AB  - Haematopoietic stem cells (HSC) first arise during development in the aorta-gonad-mesonephros (AGM) region of the embryo from a population of haemogenic endothelial cells which undergo endothelial-to-haematopoietic transition (EHT). Despite the progress achieved in recent years, the molecular mechanisms driving EHT are still poorly understood, especially in human where the AGM region is not easily accessible. In this study, we took advantage of a human pluripotent stem cell (hPSC) differentiation system and single-cell transcriptomics to recapitulate EHT in vitro and uncover mechanisms by which the haemogenic endothelium generates early haematopoietic cells. We show that most of the endothelial cells reside in a quiescent state and progress to the haematopoietic fate within a defined time window, within which they need to re-enter into the cell cycle. If cell cycle is blocked, haemogenic endothelial cells lose their EHT potential and adopt a non-haemogenic identity. Furthermore, we demonstrated that CDK4/6 and CDK1 play a key role not only in the transition but also in allowing haematopoietic progenitors to establish their full differentiation potential. Therefore, we propose a direct link between the molecular machineries that control cell cycle progression and EHT.