Mitochondrial Dysfunction and Calcium Dysregulation in Leigh Syndrome Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell Derived Neurons

Leigh syndrome (LS) is the most frequent infantile mitochondrial disorder (MD) and is characterized by neurodegeneration and astrogliosis in the basal ganglia or the brain stem. At present, there is no cure or treatment for this disease, partly due to scarcity of LS models. Current models generally...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Galera-Monge, Teresa, Zurita-Díaz, Francisco, Canals, Isaac, Grønning Hansen, Marita, Rufián-Vázquez, Laura, K. Ehinger, Johannes, Elmér, Eskil, Martin, Miguel A., Garesse, Rafael, Ahlenius, Henrik, Gallardo, M. Esther
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2020
País:España
Institución:Universidad Loyola Andalucía
Repositorio:Brújula
OAI Identifier:oai:repositorio.uloyola.es:20.500.12412/7072
Acceso en línea:https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12412/7072
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Leigh syndrome
Mitochondrial disorder
iPSC
NSC
Neuron
Disease modeling
mtDNA
Descripción
Sumario:Leigh syndrome (LS) is the most frequent infantile mitochondrial disorder (MD) and is characterized by neurodegeneration and astrogliosis in the basal ganglia or the brain stem. At present, there is no cure or treatment for this disease, partly due to scarcity of LS models. Current models generally fail to recapitulate important traits of the disease. Therefore, there is an urgent need to develop new human in vitro models. Establishment of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) followed by differentiation into neurons is a powerful tool to obtain an in vitro model for LS. Here, we describe the generation and characterization of iPSCs, neural stem cells (NSCs) and iPSC-derived neurons harboring the mtDNA mutation m.13513G>A in heteroplasmy. We have performed mitochondrial characterization, analysis of electrophysiological properties and calcium imaging of LS neurons. Here, we show a clearly compromised oxidative phosphorylation (OXPHOS) function in LS patient neurons. This is also the first report of electrophysiological studies performed on iPSC-derived neurons harboring an mtDNA mutation, which revealed that, in spite of having identical electrical properties, diseased neurons manifested mitochondrial dysfunction together with a diminished calcium buffering capacity. This could lead to an overload of cytoplasmic calcium concentration and the consequent cell death observed in patients. Importantly, our results highlight the importance of calcium homeostasis in LS pathology.