RNA-seq of Human Embryonic Stem Cell derived pancreas progenitor differentiation, Day 13 of wildtype, HES1-/-, NEUROG3-/- and HES1-/-NEUROG3-/- genotypes

To better understand the mechanism by which HES1 regulates pancreas development we took advantage of recent developments in directed differentiation of human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) to the pancreatic endocrine lineage via a series of progenitor stages (Figure 1 and (Rezania et al., 2014). Using the iCRISPR platform (González et al., 2014), we introduced indels in the HES1 and NEUROG3 genes, either singly or in combination in iCRISPR H1 cells. Using previously described gRNAs (Zhu et al., 2016) to target exon2 of the NEUROG3 gene and exon2 of the HES1 gene we detected by Sanger and RNA-sequencing a 2 bp insertion and a T insertion, respectively, resulting in premature STOP codons in two/multiple clonal cell lines carrying the introduced mutation and the loss of NEUROG3 by immunostaining We then subjected two or more clonal lines of H1-iCRISPR (wildtype), HES1−/−, NEUROG3−/− and HES1−/−NEUROG3−/− (abbreviated H1N3-dKO or H1−/−N3−/−) to differentiation to β-like cells using a modified version of the protocol from Rezania et al. (2014). Marker analysis showed that all cell lines maintained pluripotency (OCT4+) as hESC and were able to differentiate to FOXA2+ and SOX17+ co-positive definitive endoderm (DE, Day 3), PDX1+ cells at the posterior foregut stage (PF, Day 7), to bipotent progenitors marked by PDX1+ and NKX6-1+ at the Pancreatic Endoderm stage (PE, Day 10), and the Endocrine Precursor stage (EP, Day 13)