PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Shlomit Edri
AU  - Penny Hayward
AU  - Peter Baillie-Johnson
AU  - Benjamin Steventon
AU  - Alfonso Martinez Arias
TI  - An Epiblast Stem Cell derived multipotent progenitor population for axial extension
AID  - 10.1101/242461
DP  - 2018 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 242461
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/05/18/242461.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/05/18/242461.full
AB  - The Caudal Lateral Epiblast of mammalian embryos harbours bipotent progenitors that contribute to the spinal cord and the paraxial mesoderm in concert with the elongation of the body axis. These progenitors, called Neural Mesodermal Progenitors (NMPs) are identified as cells coexpressing Sox2 and T/Brachyury, a criterion used to derive NMP-like cells from Embryonic Stem Cells in vitro. However, these progenitors do not self renew, as embryonic NMPs do. Here we find that protocols that yield NMP-like cells in vitro first produce a multipotent population that, additional to NMPs, generates progenitors for the lateral plate and intermediate mesoderm. We show that Epiblast Stem Cells (EpiSCs) are an effective source for these multipotent progenitors that are further differentiated by a balance between BMP and Nodal signalling. Importantly, we show that NMP-like cells derived from EpiSCs self renew in vitro and exhibit a gene expression signature similar to that of their embryo counterparts.