Journal
STEM CELL REPORTS
Volume 9, Issue 5, Pages 1604-1617Publisher
CELL PRESS
DOI: 10.1016/j.stemcr.2017.10.006
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Funding
- UAB startup fund
- UAB Faculty Development Fund
- UAB CFRC Pilot & Feasibility Grant [ROWE15R0]
- NIH [R00HL093212, R01AG043531, CA196631-01A1, R01NS095626]
- TriStem-Star Foundation [2013-049]
- Louis V. Gerstner, Jr. Young Investigators awards
- Geoffrey Beene Junior Chair Award
- Sidney Kimmel Scholar Award
- Alfred W. Bressler Scholars Endowment Fund
- MSKCC Society Fund
- Paul F. Glenn Foundation
- Mayo Clinic Center for Individualized Medicine
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Pluripotent stem cells (PSCs) deficient for microRNAs (miRNAs), such as Dgcr8(-/-) or Dicer(-/-) embryonic stem cells (ESCs), contain no mature miRNA and cannot differentiate into somatic cells. How miRNA deficiency causes differentiation defects remains poorly understood. Here, we report that miR-302 is sufficient to enable neural differentiation of differentiation-incompetent Dgcr8(-/-) ESCs. Our data showed that miR-302 directly suppresses the tumor suppressor p53, which is modestly upregulated in Dgcr8(-/-) ESCs and serves as a barrier restricting neural differentiation. We demonstrated that direct inactivation of p53 by SV40 large T antigen, a short hairpin RNA against Trp53, or genetic ablation of Trp53 in Dgcr8(-/-) PSCs enables neural differentiation, while activation of p53 by the MDM2 inhibitor nutlin-3a in wild-type ESCs inhibits neural differentiation. Together, we demonstrate that a major function of miRNAs in neural differentiation is suppression of p53 and that modest activation of p53 blocks neural differentiation of miRNA-deficient PSCs.
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