In this study Langkabel and Horne et al. present an embryo-like organoid cell culture model termed RtL-embryoids, that can be generated from a solely embryonic stem cell-based starting cell population using cellular reprogramming paradigms. The authors demonstrate that induction of trophoblast- or endoderm- stem cell lineage-specific transgenes in two of the starting embryonic stem cell lines, in 3D co-culture with a third embryonic stem cell line, that remains in a state of pluripotency leads to self-organization into tissues resembling epiblast, extraembryonic ectoderm and visceral endoderm. This study provides a detailed analysis of the interaction between the three tissues comprising RtL-embryoids and their developmental progression, which was demonstrated to recapitulate specific developmental hallmarks of early mouse embryogenesis. The comparison to murine embryos at different development stages by single-cell RNA-Seq analysis reveals the highest similarity to embryos between E4.5 – E5.5, which was confirmed morphologically, as RtL-embryoids are demonstrated to undergo formation of rosettes and subsequent lumenogenesis in epiblast- and extraembryonic ectoderm-like tissues, accompanied by a progression of pluripotency states in cells comprising the epiblast-like compartment.
Github repository for the RNA-seq analysis of Langkabel and Horne et al. 2021
In this repository, you can find all the code that has been written by Arik Horne to analyze and visualize the scRNA-seq data presented in Langkabel and Horne et al. 2021, Additionally, you can find all raw data in Gene Expression Omnibus – NCBI together with the matrices, which were used to produce der corresponding Seurat objects.