Meiosis Project Update: Preprint Edition!

I’m happy to announce that the meiosis project preprint is now out! You can read it on bioRxiv: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.05.31.596483v1

Here’s what we did:

• Identified conditions that can initiate meiosis in human iPSCs

  • The protocol works reliably in male and female hiPSCs, and takes 13-15 days to reach pachynema

• Characterized stages of meiosis in the cells

• Characterized the gene expression in the cells over time

  • Interestingly, we are activating a lot of oogonia-related genes, but skipping over the primordial germ cell stage

Here’s what we haven’t done (yet):

• Produced late-stage meiotic cells (pachytene and later) with high efficiency. We do see a few pachytene cells, but most cells don’t make it that far.

• Fully characterized the patterns of chromosome recombination.

• Restored the DNA methylation (after we erased it) in order to establish sex-specific imprinting.

• Generated haploid human cell lines that can proliferate in culture.

Even though there’s still a lot more work to be done, I’m very excited about the progress we’ve made. As far as I know, no other protocols have made it past leptonema. (The Saitou lab just published a method of growing large numbers of human oogonia, which is very cool, but they don’t do meiosis.) I don’t think it’s an understatement to say that this is a new state of the art for the field of human in vitro gametogenesis.

I’ll end with a pretty picture: