TY - JOUR T1 - Emergence of a node-like population within an in vitro derived Neural Mesodermal Progenitors (NMPs) population JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/326371 SP - 326371 AU - Shlomit Edri AU - Penelope Hayward AU - Wajid Jawaid AU - Alfonso Martinez Arias Y1 - 2018/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/05/20/326371.abstract N2 - The mammalian embryos Caudal Lateral Epiblast (CLE) harbours bipotent progenitors, called Neural Mesodermal Progenitors (NMPs), that contribute to the spinal cord and the paraxial mesoderm throughout axial elongation. Here we performed a single cell analysis of different in vitro NMPs populations produced either from embryonic stem cells (ESCs) or epiblast stem cells (EpiSCs) and compared them to E8.25 CLE mouse embryos. In our analysis of this region our findings challenge the notion that NMPs should coexpress Sox2 and T. We built a Support Vector Machine (SVM) based on the embryo CLE and use it as a classification model to analyse the in vitro NMP-like populations. We showed that ESCs derived NMPs are heterogeneous and contain few NMP-like cells, whereas EpiSCs derived NMPs, produce a high proportion of cells with the embryo NMP signature. Importantly, we found that the population from which the Epi-NMPs are derived in culture, contains a nodelike population, which is responsible for maintaining the expression of T in vitro. These results mimic the events in vivo and suggest a sequence of events for the NMPs emergence. ER -