Mouse Ovary Tissue and Eggs Engineered from Cells

In the context of ongoing work on the beneficial effects of young ovaries in old mice, it is interesting to note that researchers have now managed to engineer functional mouse ovary tissue that produces eggs. The starting point was a cell sample, converted into induced pluripotent stem cells. It is a good example of the current state of the art in tissue engineering, in which many types of correctly functioning organ tissue can be produced in small amounts given just a small patient tissue sample to work with. Each tissue and organ requires its own recipe of signals and environment, and the discovery of working approaches is a slow grind, but once a methodology is established then the door is open for that particular tissue type.

Scientists have for this first time reprogrammed murine embryonic stem cells (ESCs) and induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) into fully functional oocytes in the laboratory. In mice, oocytes are derived from primordial germ cells (PGCs), which form around day 6.5 of embryonic development. In female embryos, the PGCs make their way to what will turn into the ovary and enter meiosis to form primary oocytes, which begin to mature following puberty. Previously, researchers reported the ability to differentiate murine ESCs and iPSCs into PGC-like cells - a process that takes about five days in vivo - that could then develop into oocytes when transplanted into adult mice. The researchers also showed that mouse-derived PGCs can be used to produce fertile oocytes in the lab.

In the present study, researchers have now extended their culturing technique to encompass the entire embryonic stem cell to oocyte differentiation, which takes about 30 days in vivo. Starting with either stem cell type, the researchers first created the PGC-like cells by inducing expression of several genes and then mixed these cells with female gonadal somatic cells - which support germ cell development - to create "reconstituted ovaries" in vitro. The cells gradually lost expression of PGC markers and began to express oocyte markers. By three weeks of growth in culture, the team observed primary oocytes in meiosis prophase I within structures that resembled secondary follicles. One of the key components at this stage was the need to add an estrogen inhibitor to get the early stage oocytes to build ovarian follicles in vitro. The researchers then added follicle-stimulating hormone and two other factors to the medium and separated each follicle-like structure - inside which oocytes continued to grow for 11 more days - resembling full-size germinal vesicle oocytes. In the third phase, the germinal vesicle oocytes were cultured for one day in maturation culture medium to become meiosis II-arrested oocytes. "The stumbling block for a long time that this research group finally managed to overcome is coordination of the female germ cell development with its somatic environment at every step along the way"

Altogether, the team conducted three separate culture experiments that produced 58 reconstituted ovaries and 3,198 germinal vesicle oocytes, of which 28.9 percent matured to the meiosis II stage. Testing the quality of the meiosis II-arrested oocytes, the team found that about 78 percent had the correct number of chromosomes. Then, using RNA-sequencing on pooled oocytes, the researchers observed expression in the culture-derived oocytes comparable to that of meiosis II oocytes derived from in vivo adult and newborn pup ovaries. There were 424 genes that were either up- or downregulated compared to in vivo-derived meiosis II oocytes, particularly, mitochondrial function genes. To test whether the lab-cultured meiosis II oocytes were fully functional, the team fertilized the oocytes with wild-type sperm in vitro, and implanted the embryos into surrogate females, which resulted in healthy pups that were slightly heavier compared to wild-type pups but that developed normally and were fertile at 11 months.

Link: http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/47256/title/From-Stem-Cell-to-Oocyte-In-a-Dish/

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